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Kentucky: Gov. Beshear Names Gay Man as State Poet Laureate, Enraging GOP

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2023 //
6

Writing in The Daily Yonder, which covers the rural South, Skylar Baker-Jordan writes about Governor Andy Beshear’s selection of Silas House as the state’s poet laureate and about his own painful childhood in Kentucky.

Kentucky is usually a red state, but Governor Beshear is a popular Democrat. While the Republican-dominated legislature has passed bills that are anti-gay, Governor Beshear boldly selected House, an openly gay man, for the prestigious honor. Republicans are furious because House, a highly regarded author, insulted them with a tweet.

Baker-Jordan writes:

After Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced Silas House as the new poet laureate of Kentucky, there has been a significant backlash against his appointment from Republicans who claim that House “hates” Kentucky.

The Republican Governors Association called him a “radical” who thinks most Kentuckians are “bigots.” Meanwhile, a gay Republican activist wrote in the Louisville Courier-Journal that he has “no respect for Mr. House, nor should Republican Kentuckians,” arguing that it was Mr. House (as opposed to his own party, which recently passed a slate of anti-LGBTQ laws) which is standing in the way of LGBTQ rights. That’s because House once dared to tell Trump voters to “kiss [his] gay country ass” in a tweet.

I can understand Silas House’s sentiment. Sometimes, to paraphrase my friend and fellow Appalachian Neema Avashia, it is very hard to love a place that does not always love you back. Just like me, Silas House is from Leslie County, Kentucky. He loves his home state, but his home state does not always love him back.

On the one hand, Kentucky truly is the “land of milk and honey” early white settlers described: Verdant forests atop rugged mountains giving way to rolling hills of the richest soil that in turn become the most beautiful wetlands as the muddy waters of the Ohio meander ever closer to the Mississippi. There is hardly an inch of that commonwealth, a name which doubles as a promise, I haven’t tread upon.

Kentucky’s hollows raised me. Its rivers saved me. Its backroads take me home, for better or for worse.

For there is another side to Kentucky. As the only openly gay student in my high school at the dawn of the 21st century, I suffered what I have often described as “a daily crucible of homophobia.” Slurs were hurled, threats were made, and hellfire was preached – all before the morning bell had tolled.

You might be tempted to tell someone to kiss your gay country ass, too. Indeed, if that is the worst thing you say to them, no less than Job would be impressed.

As you drive into Leslie County, you see signs bragging about the accomplished individuals who have called that hidden corner of southeastern Kentucky home: Tim Couch, who played in the NFL; the Osborne Brothers, legendary bluegrass performers; a Miss Basketball from the last century; and, of course, Mary Breckinridge, who revolutionized nurse-midwifery. I often joke that they will never put up a sign claiming me as one of their own. It’s just that – a joke – but it is tinged with a painful truth: no matter how much I accomplish, Leslie County will never claim me.

I know this because they do not claim Silas House. There is no sign proudly proclaiming the county as home of the acclaimed award-winning novelist, even though he has based at least one of his books in a fictionalized version of the county. House is one of the most accomplished sons of Leslie County, but because he does not fit the narrow definition of acceptability, he goes unacknowledged. His name is verboten. Other names, though, are immortalized on a green highway sign.

Perhaps this will change now that he is the commonwealth’s poet laureate. I hope so. House reminds me of the best of Kentucky, of all the reasons why despite the pain it has caused me, I long to move back. He reminds me of Johnny Cummings, who as the first openly gay mayor of Vicco, Kentucky, ushered through a fairness ordinance to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. He reminds me of Georgia Davis Powers, who defied racism and misogyny to become the first Black woman in the state senate. He reminds me of Loretta Lynn, who clawed her way from poverty to the top of the music charts. He reminds me of all of the countless kindhearted and decent people I have met in every corner of the commonwealth who do believe that I belong, who understand that “y’all” means all, and who work every single day to make sure the rest of the commonwealth understands that too.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article.

Then go to Amazon and look for books by Silas House. You might be tempted to buy one.

Categories Bigotry, Courage, Creativity, Cruelty, Extremism, Freedom, Gender, Kentucky

Gavin Newsom: GOP in South Carolina Ignore What Matters Most

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2023 //
40

Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, regularly sends out emails pointing out the errors and hypocrisies of Republicans in other states. I enjoy them.

South Carolina, Diane…

Where the Republican governor just signed a six-week abortion ban, which he says will “begin saving lives.” All while that very same governor refuses to do anything about the fact South Carolina has one of the highest homicide rates in the country — more than 2x the rate of California.

Tweet from Gavin Newsom: 'The Republican party is showing us exactly who they are. They want to tell you what you can read. What you can say. Who you can love. Or when you get to start a family. They want to make your decisions for you. That's not freedom.'

You can’t make this up.

Today’s Republican party refuses to regulate assault weapons while gun violence is the leading cause of death of kids in America, but will champion the regulation of women’s bodies and take away reproductive freedom.

This is what Republicans want to do nationally.

And worse.

Be outraged.

– Gavin

Categories California, Corruption, Cruelty, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Freedom, Guns, Health, Hypocrisy, South Carolina

Should America Be Like Florida? NO! Says Miami Herald Editorial Board

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2023 //
20

Ron DeSantis wants to make America just like Florida, where the maximum leader (Ron DeSantis) has a docile legislature that lets him decide what everyone else is allowed to do and punishes those bold enough to ignore his orders.

That’s why he is running for President. He thinks the whole nation needs and wants a maximum leader with a reactionary view of behavior and morality.

Florida is where you are free to do whatever Ron DeSantis tells you to do and free to think what he believes. If you disagree, you are no longer free.

The Miami Herald editorial board says DeSantis has turned Florida into a mean state. No, you don’t want to make America Florida.

Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican Legislature, is increasingly hard to recognize. It’s an intolerant and repressive place that bears scant resemblance to the Sunshine State of just a few years ago.

The 2023 legislative session cemented those appalling setbacks. Florida is now a state where government intrusion into the personal lives of Floridians is commonplace. What will it take for citizens to push back on this unprecedented encroachment on their rights? And, more broadly, what if Desantis supporters get what they want, which is to “make America Florida”?

The latest round of laws makes Florida sound more and more dystopian — something voters in the rest of the nation should note if they are considering what a DeSantis presidency could look like. The state has new rules for who can use which bathroom, what pronouns can be used in schools, which books can be taught and when women can get an abortion (almost never.) There are measures to strip union protections from public employees, keep transgender children and their parents from choosing to seek medical treatment, prevent universities from discussing diversity or inclusion and ban talk of gender identity or sexuality in schools all the way through 12th grade.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Guns, Hoax, Librarians, Libraries, Propaganda, Unions, Vouchers

Sam Chaltain: A Fresh Look at the Finnish Miracle

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2023 //
58

This may be the best article about education that you will read all year. It is as good an explanation as you will find of “the Finnish miracle.”

As Chaltain explains, the success of the schools is only one part of the picture. For the sixth year in a row, Finland has been named “the happiest country in the world,” based on these metrics: “healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support, low corruption, generosity in a community where people look after each other and freedom to make key life decisions.”

The secret to happiness: “Taking a holistic view of the well-being of all the components of a society and its members makes for better life evaluations and happier countries.”

Sam Chaltain writes:

I spent last week in Finland, the small Scandinavian country that, for educators, has become a Mecca of sorts. And while I was there, a surprising thing happened:

I came for the schools.

I stayed for the library.

It’s hard not to be aware of the schools, which have experienced a dramatic metamorphosis over the past half-century.

For much of the early 20th century, Finland was agrarian and underdeveloped, with a GDP per capita trailing other Nordic countries by 30 to 40 percent in 1900. But in 1917, Finland declared its independence from Russia, and insisted that women be heavily represented in its first parliament.

As a result, the new nation prioritized a whole slate of policies that have helped support the development over time of a society that values and protects children. Free preschool programs enroll 98 percent of children in the country. Compulsory education begins at the age of seven, and after nine years of comprehensive schooling, during which there is no tracking by ability, students choose whether to enroll in an academic or a vocational high school. The graduation rate is nearly 95 percent.

Finland’s deep investments in the welfare of all people impact every aspect of public life. “It seems to me that people in Finland are more secure and less anxious than Americans because there is a threshold below which they won’t fall,” said Linda Cook, a political scientist at Brown University who has studied European welfare states. “Even if they face unemployment or illness, Finns will have some payments from the state, public health care and education.”

On our tour of schools in Helsinki and Turku (the current and former capitals), we saw evidence of both the “Finnish Miracle,” and features far less miraculous.

In every location, the atmosphere in the rooms and hallways were marked by an orderly, active hum, the kind that emerges only when everyone knows one’s role, responsibility and contribution. Classes are just four or five hours a day, and as many as one-third of the courses Finnish students take are non-academic.

Lest a visitor decide that any one of these solutions would solve their country’s own problems, our host for the week — Ari Koski of Turku University — warned us that “a Finnish system doesn’t work in any school outside Finland. Everything influences everything else — and if you take one piece out, it doesn’t work anymore.”

Of those influences, Koski believes Finland’s teacher preparation program is the most important. Only eight universities are permitted to prepare teachers, and admission to these programs is highly competitive: less than one of every ten applicants is accepted.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when almost every classroom lesson I observed was . . . OK. As one of my traveling colleagues said, “I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.” And that’s because we have seen it before — teacher-driven, content-heavy, “sit and get” instruction.

Where’s the miracle in that?

Then I remembered that the goal of the Finnish system is equity — as in, choose any school, anywhere, and it will be of a certain quality — and that they have actually achieved it.

In other words, Finland’s goal is not to spark the creation of spectacular schools — it’s to ensure an entire country of good ones.

Its miracle, therefore, flows from its integration, not its innovation.

Whereas its schools may not be hotbeds of innovative teaching, the newest public library in its capital city may be the most spectacular model for the future of learning that I have ever seen.

It’s known simply as Oodi. It opened in 2018 — a gift to the Finnish people to honor a century of independence. And it is a beautiful, vibrant, multigenerational civic hub for creativity and connection.

“Oodi is what you want it to be,” explains its website. “Meet friends, search for information, immerse yourself in a book or work. Create something new in a studio or an Urban Workshop — seven days a week, from early in the morning till late in the evening.

“Oodi is a meeting place, a house of reading and a diverse urban experience. Oodi provides its visitors with knowledge, new skills and stories, and is an easy place to access for learning, relaxation and work.”

It is, in other words, the ideal “school” of the future — a living meeting place of discovery that is open to all….

Please open the link and read the rest of this wonderful post. The secret of Finland’s success is not its schools; nor even its wonderful new library. It’s the nation’s determination to ensure that everyone does well.

Compare the Finnish approach to what is happening here:

In education: competition, standardization, winners and losers, privatization, state-funded religious schools, charters and vouchers; schools without nurses. The search for silver bullets, innovation, miracles.

In society: high income inequality, high wealth inequality, many people in poverty, many people without healthcare, many homeless people.

What are our politicians talking about: critical race theory, drag queens, trans kids, book banning, censorship, making people work for any government assistance.

Do you see a pattern here?

Categories Creativity, Education Reform, Equity, Freedom, Funding, International, Joy, Poverty

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

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

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

Mississippi: Transgender Girl Missed Her Graduation Ceremony Rather Than Be Humiliated

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2023 //
46

After a federal judge told a transgender girl that she had to dress as a boy for her graduation ceremony, the senior skipped the event.

L.B., as she was known in court, had been dressing as a girl for the four years of high school. The school told her she would not be allowed to participate unless she dressed as a boy. The ACLU of Mississippi went to court on her behalf. Her request was rejected by the judge, a Trump appointee.

Categories Bigotry, Freedom, Gender, Mississippi

Reading Is Dangerous!

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2023 //
51

Read!

If you want to open your mind, read!

If you want to travel through time and space, read!

If you want to learn about other people and other cultures, read!

If you want to supercharge your creativity and imagination, read!

If you want to learn how other people see the world, read!

If you want to travel through time and space, read!

If you want to understand history, read!

Some people think these are dangerous activities. They want to control what students think. They censor books. They remove them from school libraries and public libraries. They forget that young people today have access to the Internet, which is not censored.

Live dangerously! Read books!

Categories Censorship, Education Reform, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy

Why Everyone Pays for Public Schools, Not Private or Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2023 //
29

Let’s start at the beginning.

The Founding Fathers did not mention the word “education” in the Constitution. They left it as a state responsibility. However, the Founding Fathers did not ignore education. They drafted and approved the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. These documents assured that new states would enter the United States on an equal footing with existing states. The Northwest Ordinance of 1785 declared that new towns would consist of 36 plots. One plot—#16, in the center of town—was to be set aside for a public school. Nothing was said about setting aside a plot for religious schools or private schools. Those were left to private discretion. (To learn more on this topic, read Derek Black’s Schoolhouse Burning; Black is a professor of law.)

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forever banned slavery in the new states. And it included this provision: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Those today who seek to divert public funding to religious and private schools are repudiating the intentions of the Foundding Fathers.

The following tweets seem closer to understanding the wishes of the Founding Fathers than do the legislators of Arizona, Ohio, and other states that are using public funds to subsidize religious and private schools.

Categories Citizenship, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, History, Religion, Stupid, Vouchers
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