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Gannet Workers on Strike to Protest Low Wages, Threats to Local Newspapers

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2023 //
1

Alexandra Olson of AP wrote about a strike by journalists who work for Gannett newspapers. A vibrant free press is essential to democracy. Talking heads reading from a script on television are not a good substitute for local journalism that holds power to account. The death of community and local newspapers narrows our sources of information and strengthens the handful of barons who own the networks.

NEW YORK (AP) — Journalists at two dozen local newspapers across the U.S. walked off the job Monday to demand an end to painful cost-cutting measures and a change of leadership at Gannett, the country’s biggest newspaper chain.

The strike involves hundreds of journalists at newspapers in eight states, including the Arizona Republic, the Austin American-Statesman, the Bergen Record, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, and the Palm Beach Post, according to the NewsGuild, which represents workers at more than 50 Gannett newsrooms. Gannett has said there would be no disruption to its news coverage during the strike, which will last for two days at two of the newspapers and one day for the rest.

The walkouts coincided with Gannett’s annual shareholder meeting, during which the company’s board was duly elected despite the NewsGuild-CWA union urging shareholders to withhold their votes from CEO and board chairman Mike Reed as an expression of no confidence in his leadership. Reed has overseen the company since its 2019 merger with GateHouse Media, a tumultuous period that has included layoffs and the shuttering of newsrooms. Gannett shares have dropped more than 60% since the deal closed.

Susan DeCarava, president of the The NewsGuild of New York, called the shareholder meeting “a slap in the face to the hundreds of Gannett journalists who are on strike today.”

“Gannett CEO Mike Reed didn’t have a word to say to the scores of journalists whose livelihoods he’s destroyed, nor to the communities who have lost their primary news source thanks to his mismanagement,” DeCarava said in a statement.

In legal filing, the NewsGuild said Gannett’s leadership has gutted newsrooms and cut back on coverage to service a massive debt load. Cost-cutting has also included forced furloughs and suspension of 401-K contributions….

Among the contract demands are a base annual salary of $60,000. The median pay for Gannett employee in 2022 was $51,035, according to the company’s proxy filing. Reed’s total annual compensation was valued at nearly $3.4 million, down from $7.7 million in 2021.

At the shareholder meeting, NewsGuild-CWA President Jon Schleuss said the union proposed lowering Gannett’s median CEO-to-employee ratio from 66:1 to 20:1. But Schleuss said the meeting lasted just eight minutes and Reed didn’t address any questions. In a series of tweets, Schleuss called the meeting a “complete joke…”

Gannett, which owns USA Today and more than 200 other daily U.S. newspapers with print editions, announced last August that it would lay off newsroom staff to lower costs as it struggles with declining revenue amid a downturn in ad sales and customer subscriptions.

The newspaper industry has struggled for years with such challenges, as advertising shifts from print to digital, and readers abandon local newspapers for online sources of information and entertainment. Major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have gained substantial digital audiences for coverage of broad topics, but regional and local papers have struggled to replicate that success in narrower markets…

According to the NewsGuild, Gannett’s workforce has shrunk 47% in the last three years due to layoffs and attrition. At some newspapers, the union said the headcount has fallen by as much as 90%.

The Arizona Republic, for example, has gone from 140 newsroom employees in 2018 to 89 this year, the NewsGuild said. The Austin American-Statesman’s newsroom shrunk during that period from 110 employees in 2018 to 41 this year.

Elahe Izadi of the Washington Post wrote this about the strike:

Gannett merged with the GateHouse chain in 2019, a deal that executives promised would lead to dramatic cost savings while critics warned of job cuts and leaner newsrooms. While the resulting company included 261 daily newspapers and 302 weeklies, those numbers had shrunk by the end of last year to 217 dailies and 175 weeklies, after some papers were shuttered or sold.

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle education reporter Justin Murphy said Monday’s protest represents a “desperation and fear that not only is our workplace and our employer going astray, but the consequences for our communities will be truly devastating.”

Gannett last summer froze hundreds of positions and laid off 400 employees — some of whom were the last remaining reporters at their newspapers — after a dismal financial quarter. Gannett has also offered voluntary buyouts and in December laid off 6 percent of its roughly 3,400-person news staff.

A year before he joined the paper in 2012, Murphy said the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle had a newsroom with 86 union members — a count that excludes editors and other managers — but that the number is now down to 23.

“Those of us who are left are kind of local journalism sickos who just can’t stop doing this,” he said. “As we’ve had cutbacks and cutbacks and they’ve asked us to do more and more, we’ve done it because we think it’s important that the work get done, and that’s just how we’re wired. But it’s one thing to do that when you have 86 people going to 80 or 73, but to 23? It doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Sportswriter Rob Aitken grew up reading the newspaper where he now works, the Record in northern New Jersey. “It was the best thing in the world to see your name in this paper,” he recalled. “It meant you were something.”

But now he says some high school sports are rarely written about, as staffers are stretched too thin. “You want to try to be everywhere and cover every great story. It makes you wonder how many great stories are not being told,” he said. “When we can tell a story about a kid and give them enough attention that maybe they get a college scholarship — you wonder how many kids aren’t getting that opportunity now.”

After the cutbacks, Gannett ended the year with a quarterly profit of $32.77 million, and $1.27 billion in outstanding debt.

The walkout also follows the departure of several top Gannett executives in recent months, as well as editors at some of the chain’s largest newspapers.

In a May earnings call, Reed said “2023 is off to a great start,” noting that the cuts and other “cost management initiatives” had boosted Gannett’s net income to $10.3 million, compared with a loss of $3 million during the first quarter of 2022. Digital subscriptions also grew by about 15 percent from the same time frame the previous year, totaling around 2 million paid subscribers.

Reed has also said he’s open to selling more Gannett newspapers.

“We would entertain bids on any of our markets, any of our products, that are at or above fair-market value,” he said in February. “We’re hopeful that we’ll have an opportunity this year to do that. But it’s not anything that’s in our plans.”

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Media

Harold Meyerson: Two Nations, Red and Blue

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2023 //
21

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect writes here about the sharp divergence between red states and blue states. Their elected officials have very different ideas about how to build their state and serve the needs of the public. There is one issue that he overlooked: vouchers. Red states are busy handing out tax dollars to families whose children are already enrolled in private and religious schools and tearing down the wall of separation between church and state.

Which side are you on?

He writes:

Two Prospect pieces on red and blue trifecta states make clear we really are two separate nations.

If there’s anyone who’s still mystified about why congressional Democrats and Republicans can’t come to an agreement on anything so basic as honoring the debts they’ve incurred, may I gently suggest they take a look at what Democrats and Republicans are doing in the particular states they each completely control.

Yesterday, we posted a piece by my colleague Ryan Cooper on how Minnesota, where Democrats now control both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office, has just enacted its own (to be sure, scaled-back) version of Scandinavian social democracy—including paid sick leave for all, paid family leave, a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers, sector-wide collective bargaining in key industries, and the outlawing of “captive audience” meetings, in which management compels employees to attend anti-union rants. A new law also strengthens women’s right to an abortion. Similar laws have been enacted or are under consideration in other Democratic “trifecta” states, though none quite so pro-worker as some of Minnesota’s.

Also yesterday, we posted one of my pieces, this one on everything that Texas’s Republican legislature and governor are enacting to strip power from their large cities, almost all of which are solidly Democratic. One new bill says the state can declare elections to be invalid and compel new ones to be held under state supervision in the state’s largest county, Harris County, which is home to reliably Democratic Houston. And the state Senate has also passed a bill that would strip from cities the ability to pass any regulations on wages, workplace safety, business and financial practices, the environment, and the extent of property rights that exceed the standards set by the state. Which leaves cities with the power to do essentially nothing. No other Republican trifecta states have gone quite as far as Texas, but Tennessee’s legislature did effectively abolish Nashville’s congressional district and expel its assemblymember; Alabama’s legislature revoked Birmingham’s minimum-wage law; and Florida’s governor suspended Tampa’s elected DA because he wouldn’t prosecute women and doctors for violating the state’s new anti-abortion statutes. Beyond their war on cities, Republican trifecta states have long refused to expand Medicaid coverage, have recently also begun to re-legalize child labor and legislate prison terms for librarians whose shelves hold banned books, and in the wake of the Dobbsdecision, criminalized abortions.

Just as cosmic inflation propels the stars away from each other with ever-expanding speed, so Democratic and Republican states are also moving away from each other at an accelerating pace—the Democrats toward a more humane future; the Republicans borne back ceaselessly into a nightmare version of the past. Any dispassionate view of America today has to conclude that the differences between these two Americas are almost as large and intractable as those that split the nation in 1860 and ’61. (The South’s opposition to fairly paid and nondiscriminatory labor was the central issue then and remains a central issue now.)

That said, when confronted with the choice between those two Americas, voters in those red states have frequently backed the blue-state versions of economic rights and personal freedoms, as is clear from their many initiative and referendum votes to raise the minimum wage, expand Medicaid, and preserve the right to an abortion. Likewise, the polling on unions shows their national favorability rating now exceeds 70 percent of the public, including roughly half of self-declared Republicans. Only by their relentless demagoguery on culture-war issues and immigration, their adept gerrymandering, and the disproportionate power that the composition of the Senate vests in barely inhabited states can the Republicans enforce their biases against a rising public tide—but enforce them they do wherever they have the power.

All right, as John Dos Passos wrote in his USA Trilogy, we are two nations—and becoming more so with each passing day.

Postscript: In his Washington Post column…, Perry Bacon noted that while a number of news publications have gone under recently, a few, in his words, “are reimagining political journalism in smart ways.” He cited seven such publications, and his list was headed by—ahem—The American Prospect.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Houston, Unions, Vouchers

Rich Migliore: Our Most Precious Rights Are at Risk

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2023 //
22

Retired educator Rich Migliore knows that the current rightwing demands for censorship violate the Constitution. Sadly, the current Supreme Court seems determined to obliterate the long-honored tradition of separation of church and state, creating a breach into which religious zealots are eagerly pushing their creeds. The high court has signaled through several of its recent decisions that at least five, possibly six, of its members are willing to eviscerate that separation.

He writes:

Freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the freedom to read books of our choice are among our most precious human rights. And the freedom from having other people’s religion and beliefs imposed upon us is among our basic human rights as a free people. That is why they were placed first in the Bill of Rights.

When we allow others to impose their religion and beliefs upon us we cease to be a free people. May I again quote from my favorite Supreme Court Opinion issued in the year that I graduated from high school.

“The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District; U.S. Supreme Court (1969), (quoting Justice Brennan in Keyishian v. Board of Regents.

“The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multiple of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection.”

Our founders wisely separated church and state. And the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process clause protects our liberty interest in freedom of thought, freedom of belief and freedom of religion.

We do not give up those rights “when we cross the school house gates.” Nor do our children.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Democracy, Education Reform, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, History, Religion, Separation of church and state

Texas: Independent Book Stores May Be Crushed by State Censorshup Laws

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
53

The state legislature in Texas passed a bill that will place an expensive burden on the state’s 300 or so small small bookstores. The mandate is not only costly but almost impossible to comply with. The state wants every bookstore to rate every book they sell by its “sexual content” and to refuse to sell books with sexually explicit content to teachers, librarians, and school libraries. In addition, the bookstores are supposed to report whether they have ever in the past sold books with such content to teachers or schools.

Independent bookstores around Texas warn that a bill designed to rid school libraries of sexual content could have unintended consequences that devastate their businesses.

The bill, which received final passage in the Legislature this week and is awaiting Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature, requires booksellers to rate every book they sell to a school, librarian or teacher for use in their classroom. Books can be without a rating, “sexually relevant” or “sexually explicit,” and those with the explicit rating will be banned from schools entirely.

And by April of next year, every bookseller in the state is tasked with submitting to the Texas Education Agency a list of every book they’ve ever sold to a teacher, librarian or school that qualifies for a sexual rating and is in active use. The stores also are required to issue recalls for any sexually explicit books.

Many have expressed concerns that the bill is an effort to restrict books with LGBTQ themes or by Black authors. In addition, throughout the legislative process, independent bookstores repeatedly have warned that the bill misunderstands how book sales to schools work, is unworkable in its current form and could be harmful to small businesses.

“The First Amendment person in me says, ‘Why do we have to mark the books at all? ’ The business person in me says, ‘that’s going to be very hard to administer for the middle vendor,’ which we are,” said Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Book Shop in Houston.

Owners and employees of bookstores around the state have said they don’t have the staff or expertise to read and rate every single book they are selling to an educator, and they have no records to retroactively rate every book they’ve ever sold to a school. If the TEA finds that bookstores have been incorrectly rating books, they can be banned from doing business with charter schools or school districts, which might make up between 10 percent and a third of their business.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco. He dubbed it the Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources act, or READER Act. The measure was born out of conservative fears in the last few years of sexual content in public schools. Many of the books that were subsequently identified as inappropriate were written for LGBTQ children and teenagers.

Patterson has said the bill was inspired by “Gender Queer,” a coming-of-age graphic novel that explores the author’s gender identity and personal sexuality.

“We’re not talking about a certain type of sexual activity. We’re talking about sexually explicit of any sort. It doesn’t belong in front of the eyes and in the minds of kids,” Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, said during a Senate debate Tuesday night. Paxton shepherded the measure through that chamber. [Senator Paxton is the wife of State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was just impeached for multiple financial crimes by the Texas House.]

Paxton said the bill will mostly affect large vendors, as just 50 companies sell most books purchased by Texas public schools, and three giants are responsible for the bulk of titles in campus libraries.

“If vendors want to sell books in Texas, they certainly have a vested interest in making sure it’s done properly,” she added.

But while those large vendors may be able to more easily bear the extra costs associated with this bill if it becomes law, it will be more difficult for the roughly 300 independent bookstores in Texas that have much smaller profit margins overall than the giants.

It’s common for stores to offer discounts for teachers, librarians and schools, which means the margins on those sales are lower.

For example, a librarian might give the store a list of 150 books they want to buy, at an average of 200 pages each. If this bill becomes law, the store will need to pay someone to read and rate each of those books, and run the risk of being punished by the Texas Education Agency if they get it wrong.

This could either make it more expensive for schools to buy books or make such sales infeasible for small bookstores, said Elizabeth Jordan, general manager of Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio. Her store had a goal of increasing its share of sales to schools to about 15 percent of its total business, she said, but that will no longer be possible.

“If I am selling a book to a school, I will have to have read the whole book to determine if it’s sexually relevant or sexually explicit. And both of those things, I think, are pretty subjective, and I might rate them differently than others might,” she said. “I don’t see why I would put myself at risk to do that. If all the onus is on me, all the liability is on me, and it’s not a job I’m trained to do or my employees are trained to do….

In addition, the bill requires stores to retroactively rate every book they’ve ever sold that is still “in active use by (a) district or school.”

“The way the bill is written right now is that not only can we get in trouble for what we sell to a school, we can get in trouble for something we sold 10 years ago to a school,” Koehler said.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Libraries, Lies, Literature, Texas

Book-Banning in Florida Is Contagious in Other Red States

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
24

The Associated Press published this article about how DeSantis has unleashed a nation-wide zeal for censorship. It appeared in newspapers across the nation.

TALLAHASSEE — As he vies for the Republican presidential nomination, laws pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis have led to an upswing in banned or restricted books not only in Florida schools but also in an increasing number of other conservative states.

Florida last year became the first in a wave of red states to enact laws making it easier for parents to challenge books in school libraries they deem to be pornographic, deal improperly with racial issues or are in other ways inappropriate for students.

Books ensnared in the Florida regulations include explicit graphic novels about growing up LGBTQ+, a children’s book based on a true story of two male penguins raising a chick in a zoo and “The Bluest Eye,” a novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison that includes descriptions of child sexual abuse. Certain books covering racial themes also have been pulled from library shelves, sometimes temporarily, as school administrators try to assess what material is allowed under the new rules.

While efforts to ban books or censor education material have come up sporadically over the years, critics and supporters credit DeSantis with inspiring a new wave of legislation in other conservative states to regulate the books available in schools — and sometimes even in public libraries.

The number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the U.S. last year was the highest in the 20 years the American Library Association has been tracking such efforts.

EveryLibrary, a national political action committee, said it’s tracking at least 121 proposals introduced in state legislatures this year targeting libraries, librarians, educators and access to materials. The group said 39 of those proposals would allow for criminal prosecution.

“He really is blazing a trail,” said Tiffany Justice, the Florida-based co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty, whose members have filed challenges to books in libraries in several states. “What Ron DeSantis does that I think is effective is he uses all the levers of power to make long-term change happen.”

“Other governors,” Justice said, “are paying attention and following suit.

In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law, set to take effect this summer, that could impose criminal penalties on librarians who knowingly provide “harmful” materials to minors. The law also would establish a process for the public to challenge materials and ask they be relocated to a section minors can’t access.

“It’s a perverse world when we’re talking about trying to criminalize librarians,” said Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock, which is expected to sue over Arkansas’ law.

In Indiana, school libraries will be required by July 1 to publicly post a list of books they offer and provide a complaint process for community members under a law Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed this month. In Texas, a bill creating new standards for banning books from schools that the government considers too explicit has been sent to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

In Oklahoma, the state school board has approved new rules that prohibit “pornographic materials and sexualized content” in school libraries and allow parents to submit formal complaints. The rules still must be approved by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt.

DeSantis insists books aren’t being banned, preferring to call the forced removal of some books “curation choices that are consistent with state standards.”

“There has not been a single book banned in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Wednesday. He later said, “our mantra in Florida is education, not indoctrination.”

Librarians, free speech advocates and some parents and educators say the push is driven by a small, conservative minority that happens to have outsized clout in Republican primaries like the one DeSantis is now competing in.

“This is all part of his plan to run for president, and he believes his vilification of books and what’s happening in public schools is his path to the presidency,” said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s main teachers union.

Kasey Meehan, who directs the Freedom to Read program at the writers’ organization PEN America, said that, when books are targeted in Florida, they later become the subject of complaints filed by parents in other states.

“It’s something that continues to cause alarm for individuals who are advocating for the freedom to read or for a diversity of knowledge, ideas and books to be available to students across the country,” Meehan said.

There have been challenges to books in schools for decades — “The Bluest Eye” has been targeted in various states for years, long before DeSantis became governor.

But the restrictions accelerated in Florida after DeSantis signed bills last year barring discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms, a ban that has since expanded through 12th grade. He also created a mechanism for parents to challenge books in school libraries and has targeted how race is taught in Florida schools.

Many teachers and districts complain that the laws’ standards are so vague they don’t know what books might place them in legal jeopardy.

Michael Woods, a special education teacher in Palm Beach, said new rules compelling him to catalog books in his classroom led him to empty a small library he set up where students could choose to read something that interested them. Now those volumes are stored in a box he’s stashed in his closet for fear of getting in trouble.

“That kind of positive connection to reading is no longer there,” he said.

The individual challenges to books might be coming from a fairly narrow segment of the population, according to PEN and the American Library Association, which track requests to pull books. The library association said 40% of all requests challenged 100 or more books at a time.

Raegan Miller of Florida Freedom to Read, a group fighting the book restrictions, said she has talked about education issues with fellow parents of all political persuasions for years, and no one has ever complained about inappropriate material in their children’s schools. She contends the issue has been ginned up by a small group of conservative activists.

“Do you really think we are all just happily dropping our kids off at Marxist indoctrination and pornography?” Miller said. “You only hear this stuff at school board meetings.”

Moms for Liberty, which boasts 285 chapters, has a strong presence at school board meetings in the state and nationwide. It also has successfully backed several candidates for school board.

Categories Censorship, DeSantis, Education Reform, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read

DeSantis: “There’s No Book Banning in Florida.” Really?

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
29

When Ron DeSantis launched his candidacy on Twitter, he scoffed at the notion that schools were banning books in Florida. That alone should disqualify him, based on what we have seen, heard and read about the state’s encouragement of banning books that refer to gays or racism. A complaint by a single parent is sufficient to get a book removed from the school library. Most recently, a parent at an elementary school complained about Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at President Biden’s inauguration. The poem is now available to middle school children, but not to those in the elementary school.

The Miami Herald published this editorial about the phenomenon that DeSantis says is non-existent, a hoax.

Perhaps it’s because of how Amanda Gorman alluded to the Jan. 6 attack in her famous poem, finished the night after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.”

Or maybe she wrote too bluntly about race and the legacy of slavery:

“We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.”

Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, read “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, watched by about 40 million people. She wrote the poem so “that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment,” she posted on Twitter Tuesday.

But Gorman’s poem is now deemed not age appropriate, one of four library titles Bob Graham Education Center banned, following a parent’s complaint, for elementary school students, the Herald reported. The books are now available only for middle-schoolers at the public school in Miami Lakes, even though some of them were written for younger children.

The school committee that reviewed the material didn’t offer an explanation for its decision. We’re left to wonder: What in the children’s illustrated book “The ABCs of Black History,” written for children ages 5 and up, made it so inappropriate?

Perhaps it was the mention of iconic author James Baldwin’s sexual orientation: “And he was a gay man who believed that when it comes to love, you should ‘go the way your blood beats.” Or the mention of the Little Rock Nine, the “first Black children in all-white schools,” or the Black Panther movement. Or were the colorful drawings of Black female icons like Michelle Obama and Toni Morrison — described as “ queens”— too much?

One thing is clear: Books by Black authors — and about the Black American experience — make up three of the four titles deemed inappropriate for young children at Bob Graham Education Center. The other one, “Cuban Kids,” uses photos to describe the lives of children in Cuba in the early 2000s and how different or similar they are to Americans, according to the author’s homepage. Learning about the lives of their counterparts in a socialist country — including how they got around paper shortages — is sure to turn our kids into communists.

We knew that the movement to “sanitize” school libraries that Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature unleashed would eventually catch up with Miami-Dade. Our melting pot, after all, might not be so different from Escambia County in the Panhandle, whose school board has been sued for removing books about race and LGBTQ topics.

Florida’s laws have emboldened parents and activists like Moms for Liberty to challenge materials dealing with these topics. Most recently, DeSantis signed a bill that empowers one person to file a complaint and ban a book, at least temporarily, while a district reviews it. Parents not satisfied with how a district ruled on the challenge can appeal to the state. That is bound to make schools acquiesce to offended parents.

The result, as Gorman wrote on Twitter after her poem was restricted, is that “most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves.”

Elementary students were not required to read Gorman’s work or any of the challenged titles. These were options at Bob Graham Education Center’s library. Those options also should be available for the children of all parents, not only those offended by certain content or groups skimming books to find any remote reference to race or LGBTQ issues.

“Love to Langston” was written at a second-grade reading level but no longer is accessible to second-graders at Bob Graham. The illustrated biography of Harlem Renaissancewriter Langston Hughes describes his own elementary school experience, tainted by racism, in the early 1900s:

“In Topeka, Kansas the teacher makes me sit in the corner; in the last row; far away; from the other kids.”

The parent who filed the complaint said “Love to Langston” contained critical race theory, “indirect hate messages,” gender ideology and indoctrination, the Herald reported. It’s unclear how.

It is curious, however, that “indoctrination” and “hate messages” seem to be flagged mostly when when Black authors write about being Black, or when LGBTQ authors write about being queer. The adults must ask themselves why that’s the case before making them inaccessible to children.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Hoax, Ignorance, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literature

Memorial Day: Dangers to Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
52

Memorial Day is a day to remember and pay tribute to the men and women who gave their lives to defend our democracy. Because of their sacrifice, we enjoy our freedoms. We are called upon not only to respect them and their sacrifices, but to be alert to today’s threats to the freedoms and rights we treasure. Voting rights are under attack. Censorship and book banning are on the rise. Red state legislatures are trying to control the blue cities in their midst. Red state legislatures are passing cookie-cutter laws to fund private and religious schools despite the opposition of the public. A woman’s right to control her body has been eliminated by red states. In a sad irony, the U.S. Supreme Court—which has long been the ultimate defender of our rights—is eroding democracy, under the control of rightwing ideologues, three of whom were appointed by Trump after being chosen by the extremist Federalist Society.

In that spirit, I post a comment by the polymath Bob Shepherd, who contributes his wisdom to us as a reader of the blog..

Pardon me, but this is so important that I want to make sure that I say the whole properly. So, some repetition here:

The Extreme Court decisions that just wiped out much of the power of the EPA to regulate air pollution (West Virginia v. EPA) and water pollution (Sackett v. EPA) in the United States are PART of an overall effort, begun in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, to ERASE much of the authority of the United States federal government on the basis of a NOVEL reinterpretation of the Constitution that ELIMINATES THE ABILITY OF THE EXECUTIVE TO EXERCISE UNENUMERATED POWERS–powers not SPECIFICALLY given it by the Constitution. This would reduce the federal government to a SHADOW of its former reach. Ron DeSantis just gave a speech in which he discussed precisely this, which he described as the necessity of “Reconstitutionalizing” our government:

“There’s a lot that the executive branch can do, and all I will say when it comes to these agencies… [is] buckle up when I get in there because the status quo is not acceptable, and we are going to make sure that we reconstitutionalize this government, and these agencies are totally out of control. There’s no accountability, and we are going to bring that in a very big way.”

In connection with this envisioned vast overhaul of U.S. governance, DeSantis made this chilling promise:

“Even my worst critics in Florida will acknowledge when I tell people I’m going to do something, I don’t make promises or say I’m going to do something lightly.”

Here’s what I think is happening: Repugnican leaders have recognized that if Jabba the Trump wins the nomination, they will lose again. So, the current plan is to remove Trump by standing aside and letting the judicial process do that for them via the various cases now pending against the Orange Idiot. That way, they can take him out of the picture while not alienating the Trumpanzees from themselves–they can blame the fall of the Glorious Leader on some Deep State conspiracy led by Biden. Then, DeSantis will assume the Orange mantle and carry forward, in the Executive branch, the agenda that the Reich-wing cabal at the head of the Judicial branch has set for itself. (NB: the Orange Idiot Trump was extremely useful to The Federalist Society because he, knowing nothing himself, simply rubber stamped putting those people in place–the ones now reenvisioning U.S. government entirely).

It is worth remembering in this regard that the revolution in Germany that scuttled democratic government there and put the Fascists under Hitler in power took place BY LEGAL MEANS. And so the history we haven’t learned from repeats itself. Couple this legal implementation of the no unenumerated powers theory with the independent state legislature theory also being endorsed by the Extreme Court (a theory that holds that state legislatures, which are predominately Repugnican, can hold do-overs if they don’t like election results) and you get the recipe for the end of democracy and the onset of Fascist governance in the United States.

This is how these traitors overthrow democratic government. In the background, not via some sort of January 6th event.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Elections, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Justice

“Scientific American” Editorial Board Warns About DeSantis “Anti-Science Agenda”

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2023 //
40

The editorial board of the prestigious journal “Scientific American” lambasted Ron DeSantis’ hostility to science, which endangers the people of Florida. Should he be successful in his quest for the Presidency, his retrograde ideology would endanger the entire nation. His combination of “cruelty, bigotry, and megalomania” will cause endless harm to the U.S.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is running for president of the United States on a record of anti-diversity, pro-censorship, white nationalistmeasures. He has targeted education, LGBTQ rights and access to health care, and should he prevail, his anti-science candidacy stands to harm millions of Americans.

DeSantis has banned books in school libraries, restricted teachers’ classroom discussions about diversity, prohibited high school classes that focus on Black history and people, politicized college curricula, limited spending on diversity programs, ignored greenhouse gas reduction in climate change policy, diminished reproductive rights and outlawed transgender health care.

The governor has refused all evidence that masks are safe and help prevent COVID, appointed a surgeon general who advised against vaccines, and continues to paint science and evidence as restrictions to the freedom of Floridians. Instead of limiting the role of government, as he claimed in his fight against masks, he is expanding it to selectively promote a particular religious agenda.

The maternal mortality rate in Florida is rising, yet DeSantis signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, outlawing it after six weeks of pregnancy and endangering people who have life-threatening complications that termination could help. Black women in Florida have the worst maternal mortality rates of any group in the state, and research has shown that people who are denied abortions and forced to give birth suffer mentally, financially and educationally. These statistics surely won’t improve under these new laws, which are pushing health care providers to move out of the state.

By making gender-affirming care for youth illegaland disparaging the use of preferred pronouns and names, the governor and his followers will undoubtedly add to the suffering of transgender individuals. Multiple studies have looked at the mental health of transgender teens. Researchers have found that giving puberty blockers to youth questioning the gender they were assigned at birth reduces depression, anxiety and anger. In another study, 56 percent of transgender youth surveyed had attempted suicide, and causes included feeling they didn’t belong, being excluded and a profound lack of self-worth.

Despite Florida’s vulnerability to climate change, whether through natural disaster or sea-level rise, DeSantis has ignored scientific evidence again, refusing to address the role of greenhouse gas emissions in global warming. He has focused instead on adaptation, or resiliency measures. He’s also nixed sustainable investment efforts like bonds that would fund renewable energy measures in the state. But adaptation and mitigation go hand-in-hand. Without reducing the cause of climate change, adaptation will only go so far, and under DeSantis, Florida remains at high risk of climate-related disaster.

DeSantis has signed bills allowing people to challenge school library books they deem unfit for children. To date, books pulled from library shelves include a biography of baseball player Roberto Clemente (which was later restored), poetry from Amanda Gorman, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and books about Black, Cuban and LGBTQ perspectives.

The authors of several books that have been pulled from Florida’s shelves have sued the state for violating both their First Amendment rights to free speech and their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the law. The teachers’ union and other groups are suing on the grounds that the law extends beyond schools into public libraries.

His “Don’t Say Gay” law prevents teachers from talking about homosexuality or being transgenderthrough high school. Such rules prevent comprehensive sex education and invalidate LGBTQ students, adding to the mental health burden of a state that has a severe shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists.

DeSantis and the far right misrepresent critical race theory (which examines the role of race in the legal system) and pressured the College Board to remove references to the theory from the Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum. The governor’s actions are part of a large-scale misinformation campaign to stoke white fear and uphold white nationalism. Yet, racism is reality, and in our multicultural, multilingual, global society, promoting white nationalism will create a generation of students who cannot reason and think as critically as their peers.

The governor has also banned Florida colleges’ efforts to promote diversity, inclusion and equity. The bans could affect all aspects of education, including efforts to recruit nonwhite STEM students and scientists to higher education. He has stacked the New College of Florida board of trustees, historically apolitical, with conservative ideologues to create an institute of higher learning that adheres to his version of American education and white exceptionalism, which is explicitly modeled on conservative evangelical Christian colleges.

What Ron DeSantis has done in Florida mirrors efforts in other states, including Texas. He is among a new class of conservative lawmakers who speak of freedom while restricting freedom. This political maneuvering is part of building his national presence yet it does not represent most Americans’ views. The population of Florida is growing fasterthan most other places in the U.S., but the state is now poised to have fewer critical thinkers, fewer people of color as educators and as the subjects of education, more deaths in childbirth, and scores of people in the throes of crisis because of their identities. A country led by someone wielding such cruelty, bigotry and megalomania will never be “a more perfect Union.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Education Reform, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Gender, Health, Science

Michael Hiltzik on the Ron and Elon Show

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2023 //
32

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles reviewed the debut of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign on Twitter, accompanied by Elon Musk. DeSantis boasted about the glory of debate and free speech, which he has done his best to stifle in Florida. And he adamantly denied that there was any book banning in his state, despite the fact that PEN America says that Florida is number two in the most books banned, behind Texas. The guy rules Florida with an iron hand, suppressing the teaching of history he doesn’t like, demonizing drag queens and anything LGBT, and encouraging vigilante censorship.

Column: Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk give us a preview of the chaos of a DeSantis presidency

The SpaceX Starship

Elon Musk hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Twitter for DeSantis’ announcement of his presidential candidacy. It went about as well as the April 20 launch of a rocket by Musk’s SpaceX, which ended in an explosion that destroyed the spacecraft.

(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

BY MICHAEL HILTZIK

I was taking my customary siesta Wednesday afternoon when I was jolted awake by the sound of a truck straining to go uphill. Come to discover that I had my computer tuned to Elon Musk’s Twitter, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was struggling to get out the official announcement of his candidacy for president.

The noise turned out to be Musk trying to get the thing to work in real time, amid feedback, weird musical interludes and long stretches of silence. Scheduled to start at 3 p.m. Pacific time, it finally got going on Twitter Spaces, an audio-only application on the platform, about 18 minutes late. I listened, so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

As he struggled to resolve repeated glitches in Twitter Spaces, Musk and the moderator, a Musk acolyte named David Sacks, kept trying to assert that the technical screw-up was, in fact, a triumph brought about by the large audience. (Sacks claimed that more than 300,000 users had logged in.) “We are melting the servers, which is a good sign,” Sacks said early on.

This reminded many listeners of the claim by SpaceX, another Musk venture, that its April 20 launch of a prototype rocket, which ended with the vehicle exploding in flight four minutes after lift-off, was a success. Never mind that the launch destroyed the launchpad, showered a neighboring community with debris and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to mount a major investigation.

Once it got underway, the Twitter event unfolded as a love fest between DeSantis and Musk. The general theme was what my mother used to describe as “I like me, who do you like?”

Musk and DeSantis praised each other for their dedication to free speech, and Sacks brought on several right-wing sophists to add their voices. They included Jay Bhattacharya, one of the drafters of the Great Barrington Declaration, which, as I reported this week, advocated letting the COVID virus run rampant through the population in quest of the elusive goal of “herd immunity” — at the cost (thus far) of more than 1.13 million American lives.

Another was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), whose claim to fame on a national scale was issuing a Christmas tweet in 2021 showing himself, his wife and their five kids brandishing assault weapons. “Santa, pls bring ammo,” the tweet read. (In December 2021, there were 39 mass shootings in the U.S., taking 36 lives and wounding 160.)

DeSantis said Florida was safer than blue-state cities, where “you got kids more likely to get shot than to receive a first-class education.” A reminder: One of the worst school shootings in American history took place in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018, when 17 people were killed and 17 injured. In April, DeSantis signed a law allowing Floridians to carry guns without a permit.

It would be wrong to say there weren’t some lighthearted moments during the Twitter event. Unfortunately for DeSantis, the best joke came from President Biden: While Musk was struggling to get the event launched, Biden posted a tweet that read, “This link works,” pointing to a fund-raising site for the Biden-Harris campaign.

If you were looking for policy prescriptions from the freshly minted candidate, you didn’t hear anything new. Put it this way: If you were at a party where you had to down a shot of whiskey every time DeSantis uttered the word “woke,” you were reduced to insensibility within ten or twenty minutes. If the drinking game included a shot when DeSantis took a shot at “the legacy media,” you may have needed to get your stomach pumped.

Other than that, it was a festival of cynical lies and rank hypocrisies uttered by DeSantis.

He spoke up for free speech and open debate, for instance. “People should be exposed to different viewpoints,” he said. “You can’t have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that are affecting our civilization.”

This is the guy who has waged a ferocious battle with Walt Disney Co. because Disney had spoken out against his “Don’t Say Gay” law, which stifles the teaching of gender issues in the schools.

When Sacks primed him with a question about the fight with Disney, DeSantis replied, “We believe jamming gender ideology in elementary school is wrong; Disney obviously supported injecting gender ideology in elementary school.” He added that Disney’s “corporate culture had really been outed as trying to inject matters of sex into the programming for the youth.” One doesn’t have to be a fan of Disney to see that as fatuous claptrap.

DeSantis also dismissed accusations that Florida is a hotbed of book-banning as “a hoax.” All his administration has done, he said, has been “to empower parents with the ability to review the curriculum, to know what books are being used in school.” That’s one way of looking at it.

The right way is to observe that he’s empowered a tiny cadre of reactionary activists to force books they don’t like off the shelves of Florida schools. As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, a majority of the complaints about schoolbooks nationwide have come from just 11 complainants. Florida ranks second among the states in the number of schoolbook challenges, after Texas.

By the way, one of the Republican toadies DeSantis appointed to the board created to oversee Disney’s development district (as part of his retaliation against the company) is Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the right-wing censorship-happy organization Moms for Liberty.

When Bhattacharya came online, DeSantis took the opportunity to boast about his success against the COVID pandemic. The truth is that Florida’s record is one of abject, lethal failure. Florida’s COVID death rate of 411 per 100,000 population is the 10th worst in the nation. DeSantis has appointed Bhattacharya to a state panel investigating federal COVID policy.

DeSantis claimed to have based his COVID policies on his determination to “look at the data…. There was a concerted effort to try to stifle dissent.” This can only be interpreted as some kind of gag. DeSantis installed a COVID crackpot, Joseph Ladapo, as Florida’s surgeon general.

Ladapo has promoted useless anti-COVID nostrums such as ivermectin, and counseled against the COVID vaccines. “Looking at the data”? As the Tampa Bay Times has reported, based on official state documents, Ladapo deliberately removed data from an official state report on the vaccines that contradicted his claim that the vaccines were unsafe for young men; in fact, studies show that the vaccines are far safer for them than being infected by the virus.

The event ended with a paean by Musk and DeSantis to cryptocurrency, which is tantamount to enticing innocent small investors into immolating their nest eggs in a scam.

“We should do it again,” DeSantis said in closing the feed. “We’ll make sure that we come back and do it again. This is a great platform.”

We shall see. The next DeSantis appearance on Twitter could be just as buggy, or worse. All that we can be sure of is that whatever happens, Elon Musk will deem it a great success.

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Ethics, Failure, Florida, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Politics, Republicans

NAACP and Others Issue Travel Advisory: Avoid Florida! Bigots Run the State!

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2023 //
19

NPR reported on a warning issued by the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP. Travelers should avoid Florida, where there is a pervasive air of bigotry and easy access to guns. The warning nearly coincided with Ron DeSantis’ declaration of his campaign, on a media platform with billionaire Elon Musk. DeSantis will tout his record of stern opposition to migrants, gays, drag queens, transgender people, Black history, and his unwavering support for censorship and guns.

ORLANDO, Fla. — The NAACP over the weekend issued a travel advisory for Florida, joining two other civil rights groups in warning potential tourists that recent laws and policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

The NAACP, long an advocate for Black Americans, joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, in issuing travel advisories for the Sunshine State, where tourism is one of the state’s largest job sectors.

The warning approved Saturday by the NAACP’s board of directors tells tourists that, before traveling to Florida, they should understand the state of Florida “devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”

Critics say Florida aims to rewrite history by rejecting African American studies

An email was sent Sunday morning to DeSantis’ office seeking comment. The Republican governor is expected to announce a run for the GOP presidential nomination this week.

Florida is one of the most popular states in the U.S. for tourists, and tourism is one of its biggest industries. More than 137.5 million tourists visited Florida last year, marking a return to pre-pandemic levels, according to Visit Florida, the state’s tourism promotion agency. Tourism supports 1.6 million full-time and part-time jobs, and visitors spent $98.8 billion in Florida in 2019, the last year figures are available.

DeSantis’s efforts to exclude migrants may hurt Florida more than the boycott. Will the tourism industry have the staff it needs for hotels and restaurants? Will the agricultural industry have enough laborers to pick crops?

DeSantis’s war on teaching accurate, factual history about American history, his demands for book banning, and his support for vouchers for every student in the state, even those already in private schools, degrades education and intelligence in Florida.

DeSantis is running on a platform of hate, bigotry, and disunity. Let’s see how that plays.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Curriculum, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Religion, Republicans, Vouchers
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