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

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
24

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

South Carolina: State Supreme Court Upholds Near Total Ban on Abortion

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
42

The Republicans continue their war against abortion, even though the majority in every state want to keep it legal. Few if any women realize they are pregnant at the six-week mark.

The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the state’s new near-total ban on abortion by a 4-1 vote, reversing a decision it had made in January that struck down a similar ban and declared that the State Constitution’s protections for privacy included a right to abortion.

The court’s decision was not unexpected, because the makeup of the bench had changed, and Republicans in the State Legislature had passed a new abortion law in the hopes that it would find a friendlier audience with the new court. The decision in January was written by the court’s only female justice; she retired and South Carolina now has the nation’s only all-male high court.

The decision repeated what the justices said in January about a right to privacy in the State Constitution, but said the Legislature had addressed the concerns in the first law and “balanced” the interests of pregnant women with those of the fetus.

“To be sure, the 2023 Act infringes on a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” Justice John Kittredge wrote for the majority.

But, he added, “We think it is important to reiterate: we are constrained by the express language in the South Carolina Constitution that prohibits only ‘unreasonable invasions of privacy.’

“The legislature has made a policy determination that, at a certain point in the pregnancy, a woman’s interest in autonomy and privacy does not outweigh the interest of the unborn child to live…”

Until now, South Carolina had allowed abortion until 22 weeks, which had increasingly made the state a haven for women seeking abortions as other Southern states banned the procedure.

Republicans said their next step would be a total ban on abortions.

The likely result: Wealthy and middle-income women who want an abortion will go to a state where it is legal. Poor women won’t be able to afford to make the trip. There will be more children born to poor mothers. In South Carolina, there is fervor to support the unborn but not the born.

Categories Cruelty, Extremism, Gender, Health, South Carolina

Katherine Stewart: The Fascist Intellectuals and Crackpots of the Right

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
34

Katherine Stewart has written several important books about the insidious Right and their radical, racist views. In this article in The New Republic, she looks at an influential reactionary organization, the Claremont Institute, and traces its ideological forebears. From crackpots to intellectual gurus, she traces the Right’s fascination with manliness, racism, anti-Semitism, and its longing for a world led by a new Caesar, a strong man who will protect other men from rapacious women and immigrants.

It’s a long read but worth your time. Stewart looks at the Fascist underbelly of conservatism, and it’s repulsive.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Gender, Trump

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: The War to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
12

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote in their blog Steady about the importance of saving public education from the forces trying to destroy and privatize it. They remind us and the general public that public schools unite us; privatization is inherently divisive. It is ironic that the red states are implementing voucher plans as the evidence about the failure of vouchers and the null effects of charter schools grows stronger. (The boldfacing of passages in their essay was added by me).

It is back to school. Students of all ages flock to campuses and classrooms. Fleeting memories of summer are quickly replaced by tests and textbooks.


Getting into the swing of a new semester has always included an adjustment period, but this is a particularly difficult time for many of our nation’s students and their parents, guardians, teachers, and others entrusted with the education of young minds.


The pandemic wreaked havoc with the emotional, intellectual, and social development of America’s youth. Dismal test scores provide depressing data of yawning learning deficits. Talk to anyone in or around schools and you hear stories of setbacks and struggle — heaps of qualitative data suggesting a staggering scale of generational loss.
As usual, those who were already the most marginalized have paid the heaviest price. The pandemic exacerbated existing disruptions and placed greater strain on finances and time, particularly in large urban districts and small rural ones tasked with educating children from families struggling economically.


We like to tell ourselves that the United States is a great meritocracy, but wealth and levels of family education continue to play outsized roles in dictating a child’s likelihood of academic success long before she learns her ABCs. The simple truth is that kids come to school from widely different circumstances, and these influence their ability to thrive, independent of whatever innate intelligence or drive they may possess. The pandemic made these differences more acute.


The United States does possess a system (or more accurately, a collection of thousands of systems) that, if nurtured and respected, could foster greater equality of opportunity. And it is exactly the institution that is now struggling the most: public education. America’s public schools were once the envy of the world as engines of opportunity and upward mobility. If the nation had the will, they could return to that status once again.


Our public schools certainly weren’t perfect in the past, especially during legal racial segregation, when the lie of “separate but equal” (separate is never equal) helped enshrine white supremacy. The segregated schools of the Jim Crow Deep South were a shameful injustice and a stain on our national identity. They were inconsistent with our founding documents, which spoke eloquently about equality among people. Of course there was (and remains, to some extent) de facto segregation throughout America based on who lives in what neighborhoods. Well-financed suburban schools were often part of the draw of “white flight” from urban districts.


The very ethos of public education should be one of inclusion for America’s diverse population. It should be a place where children of different backgrounds come together to learn both from teachers and from each other. Our schools should be places that allow students to wrestle with what it means to be part of this great country, including understanding America’s uneven and often bloody road to greater equality.


Sadly, in recent years, we have seen a grave regression from these noble goals. Our schools and school districts have become fiercely contested frontlines in an era of stepped-up culture wars. As reactionary political forces target what we teach our children, it is no accident that truth, empathy, and our democratic values have become casualties.

A chief concern is how and what we teach about our history, particularly the Black experience, and race and ethnicity more generally. We have written here before about the shameful whitewashing of racial violence and injustice, including slavery, by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But this effort is not limited to him or that state. There is a national movement to not tell the full — and unfortunately tragic — reality of race in American history and how it continues to shape the nation.


Another serious concern is the othering of LGBTQ+ students and teachers. After years of progress, we see a wave of intolerance spread across America, including in our schools.


Few institutions in American life are as essential to the continuation of our democracy as the public schools. In a time of ascendent autocracy, attacks on our schools — how they are run, what they teach, what books they have in their libraries — are among the most pernicious, pathetic, and painful assaults on the health of our nation.

Several months back, Texas Monthly ran a striking piece of journalism with the headline, “The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools.” It tells a story that extends beyond the raucous school board meetings and book banning campaigns that have gotten the most attention. There is a movement afoot, and not just in Texas, to destroy public schools more generally, to privatize education through vouchers and other means.


In this context, the various culture fights become battles in a larger war over the very future and viability of public education:

Taken individually, any of these incidents may seem like a grassroots skirmish. But they are, more often than not, part of a well-organized and well-funded campaign executed by out-of-town political operatives and funded by billionaires in Texas and elsewhere. “In various parts of Texas right now, there are meetings taking place in small and large communities led by individuals who are literally providing tutorials—here’s what you say, here’s what you do,” said H. D. Chambers, the recently retired superintendent of Alief ISD, in southwest Harris County. “This divisiveness has been created that is basically telling parents they can’t trust public schools. It’s a systematic erosion of the confidence that people have in their schools.

The ideal of quality, integrated public schools for all children in the United States epitomizes the promise of our country’s founding as a place of equality and opportunity for all. It thus makes sense that would-be autocrats and protectors of privilege would seek to undermine our public schools by whatever means necessary. We must see this as what it is: as much a threat to the nation as was the violent storming of our Capitol.

The future of the United States depends on an educated and empathetic citizenry. It requires us to share a sense of common purpose and recognize our common humanity. It requires an environment that allows every child to thrive and see themselves included in the American story. It requires quality public education. Full stop.

A historic battle to save this institution and the very idea of good public schools has been underway for some time. It is now intensifying. Attention must be paid.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Gender, History, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Privatization, Providence, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

California: State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Speaks Up for LGBT Youth and Is Ejected by Chino Valley School Board

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
8

California’s State Superintendent Tony Thurmond went to speak at a meeting of the school board of the Chino Valley Unified School District. He was invited by students there to speak against a policy that the board was about to vote on, one that required teachers to report to parents if a student wanted to be identified by a gender different from the one on his or her birth certificate.

Carl J. Petersen, parent advocate in Los Angeles, describes what happened at the meeting.

He writes:

In a perfect world, all children would have relationships with their parents where they felt safe to discuss any subject without hesitation. Homes would be judgment-free zones where all children, even those questioning their gender identity, would be accepted and loved unconditionally. But in the words of Ice T, It “ain’t like that.”

In reality, there are children whose physical well-being would be put in danger if their parents were to find out that they were members of the LGBTQ+ community. Others might face emotional abuse or estrangement. According to the National Coalition For The Homeless, “LGBTQ+ youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than non-LGBTQ youth.”These effects are not limited to parents whose hopeless bigotry is stronger than their love for their children. Some may have unwittingly sent homophobic messaging that they would surely drop if they knew how much they were hurting their child. Others might be struggling to process reality but, given the time, may provide the acceptance that is deserved.

It is families within this last group of parents who will be hurt by policies like the one just passed by the Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD). By requiring parental notification “after a student requests to identify with a gender different than what is on their birth certificate”, politicians are forcibly outing children at a pace that they may not be ready for. They are also eliminating a path to support from outside the family structure, one that is essential when “LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers.”

Students invited Superintendent Thurmond to speak. The board allowed him only one minute, although it is customary to allow more time for elected officials. After one minute, his microphone was cut off.

Petersen wrote, “When he approached the podium again to rebut the Board President’s response to his comments, he was evicted from the room.”

Petersen wrote a letter to Superintendent Thurmond, thanking him for standing up for LGBT students and warning that theofascist extremists, inspired by Ron DeSantis and his crusade against LGBT people, were leading efforts like the one in Chino Valley.

Categories Bigotry, California, Gender

Darcie Cimarusti: Beware of the So-Called Parental Rights Groups

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
1

Darcie Cimarusti died a few days ago after a valiant fight against ovarian cancer. She was the communications director for the Network for Public Education and a treasured friend to all who worked with her. Having served many years on her local school board in Highland Park, New Jersey, she was passionately committed to supporting public schools against baseless attacks on the schools and their teachers.

Last December, despite her illness, Darcie wrote an article about hyper partisan groups like Moms for Liberty that were besieging local school boards with baseless complaints and driving wedges among parents.

Her article was printed in newspapers across the nation. This one appeared in the Bedford Gazette. She never stopped speaking up for what she believed in. Hers was the voice of reason, calm, common sense, and responsibility.

She wrote:

I have been a local school board member since my daughters, now 11th-graders, were in second grade. In that time, I have been involved in education policy discussions at the local, state and national levels on issues such as the rights of LGBTQ students, standardized testing and the privatization of public education.

The rise of the so-called “parental rights” movement in public education has been one of the thorniest, most perplexing issues I have encountered.

Parents certainly play a crucial role in the education of their children. Who would dare argue that they don’t? But heavily funded, right-leaning parents groups such as Moms for Liberty have unleashed a juggernaut of opposition to “critical race theory,” LGBTQ rights, social emotional learning, diversity equity and inclusion. So it has become imperative that we have an honest discussion about how much say parents should have in what is (or is not) taught in our public schools.

My district, unlike many, is racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, with 31 languages spoken in the homes of our students. Educating such a diverse student body presents many challenges and requires a nuanced approach to policy and practice to ensure all students have equal opportunities to learn, thrive and grow. While it is easy for school leaders to say they embrace diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s far too challenging to implement policies promoting those principles.

I have spent my time on the school board helping to develop systems that ensure decisions are made collaboratively and with as many voices involved as possible. This means making space not only for administrators, teachers, parents and students but also ensuring that historically marginalized groups are represented.

Decisions that affect students should never be based on the whims of the most privileged or powerful, and not on whose voice is loudest.

But the latter has become the hallmark of parental rights activists. They attend meeting after meeting, berating, shouting down and even making death threats against school board members. During the pandemic, battles over masks erupted at podiums at far too many school board meetings across the country and quickly morphed into demands to ban books, censor curriculum and muzzle “woke” teachers that parents accused of “grooming” their children.

In the 2022 midterm elections, parental rights activists were on the ballot in many states. With the support and endorsement of Moms for Liberty, they ran campaigns to become school board members in districts in red, blue and purple states. Moms for Liberty operates county chapters that aim to serve as watchdogs “over all 13,000 school districts.” Chapters empower parents to “defend their parental rights” and “identify, recruit and train liberty-minded parents to run for school boards.”

The “anti-woke” agenda espoused by Moms for Liberty and endorsed by school board candidates had the greatest successes in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis proudly declared the state was “where woke goes to die.” But in many other parts of the country, parental rights candidates lost their elections, with even conservative political operatives acknowledging that many of their campaigns were “too hyperbolic.”

Chaos has already erupted in several districts where they succeeded and won board majorities, with newly formed, inexperienced boards firing superintendents or forcing them to resign. One board voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory just hours after being sworn in.

After a decade of experience as a school board member, one thing I can say for sure is that the majority of parents, teachers and community members do not respond well to instability and disruption in their local public schools. When school boards run amok and rash decisions make headlines, communities work quickly to restore calm. If parental-rights school boards continue to govern recklessly, they will undoubtedly face a backlash from voters.

Creating and implementing sound school policies and practices that respect and affirm all students requires collaboration. It does not allow for the divisive, polarizing rhetoric and impetuous, rash decision-making that have become the calling cards of the so-called parental rights movement.

+1 

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

OHIO: Vote NO on Issue #1! Today!

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
2

The Ohio legislature passed a strict ban on abortion, prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. That is so early that women don’t know they are pregnant. So the law amounts to a total ban.

Supporters of abortion rights gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the November ballot that would write protection for abortion rights into the state constitution.

The legislature doesn’t want that referendum to pass, so they called a special election for August 8—TODAY—asking if voters would change the law so that it takes a 60% + 1 majority to pass a change in the state constitution. Currently, a referendum wil pass with 50% plus 1. (Several months ago, the legislature banned special elections in August because of low turnout; but they ignored the law they assed, hoping for low turnout.)

The legislature assumes that the abortion rights supporters cannot teach 60%.

This referendum attacks not just abortion rights; it attacks democracy. Should it pass, any change in the state constitution would be very difficult to achieve.

If you support democracy, if you believe that 50% + 1 should win elections, vote NO today against Issue #1.

No matter how you feel about abortion, defend democracy. Vote NO on Issue #1.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Ohio

Ohio: Vote NO on Issue 1 on Tuesday to Preserve Majority Rule

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2023 //
4

Ohio Republicans are trying to ban abortion by limiting it to six weeks, before women know they are pregnant. The legislature passed a law prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy but a federal judge halted the implementation of the ban. However, people who support reproductive rights want to write them into the state constitution. They gathered more than 700,000 signatures, nearly double what the state requires. They succeeded in getting their referendum on the ballot in November.

The state Republicans want to stop them but they know that abortion rights have prevailed in other red states (think Kansas). So the legislature came up with a new ploy: there will be a special election on Tuesday August 8, to require that any change in the state constitution get not a simple majority, but at least 60% of the vote. Furthermore, any proposal to change the constitution would require signatures from all 88 counties, not the current 44. Obviously they want to blunt the pro-abortion campaigners by making it nearly impossible to get on the ballot.

Republican strategists are hoping that turnout will be low and that the abortion rights side will fail to block the referendum. Polls have shown that some 58% support abortion rights, so they will never pass an amendment if Issue 1 succeeds and raises the threshold to 60%.

Politico wrote:

Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, a nonpartisan coalition of abortion-rights groups, submitted the ballot language earlier this year, kicking off a four-month dash to collect signatures and campaign across the state. Proponents, including state Democrats, ACLU of Ohio and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, anticipate spending upward of $35 million on the effort heading into November.

Opponents have pushed against the measure by arguing that it would allow for gender-affirming care without parental consent, even though such a provision is not in the initiative’s language.

Aside from the abortion issue, there is a question about whether it’s right to impose a 60% requirement to get a referendum on the ballot. Why not let the majority (50% plus 1) decide?

Paul Waldman wrote on MSNBC’s site that the issue is stark: Now Ohio Republicans are trying to duck the will of the voters with some clever maneuvering. The state’s voters will decide on two ballot initiatives in two separate elections in a matter of months. One is explicitly about abortion, while the other is only implicitly about abortion but would go even further, to the very question of whether democratic accountability should exist at all…

Lest there be any doubt, the Legislature scheduled the vote on Issue 1 for a special election in August, when it could be assured a lower turnout. So if it succeeds, the abortion amendment on the ballot in November would have to get 60% to pass. Ohio Republicans are so committed to this farce that the Legislature ignored the law it passed in December banning almost all August special elections. When liberals pointed out the obvious contradiction, the Republican-majority on the state’s Supreme Court ruled the Legislature could simply break the law it passed less than a year ago.

Meanwhile, doctors in Ohio have mobilized against the abortion ban, according to ProPublica.

In her eight years as a pediatrician, Dr. Lauren Beene had always stayed out of politics. What happened at the Statehouse had little to do with the children she treated in her Cleveland practice. But after the Supreme Court struck down abortion protections, that all changed.

The first Monday after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling was emotional. Beene fielded a call from the mother of a 13-year-old patient. The mother was worried her child might need birth control in case she was the victim of a sexual assault. Beene also talked to a 16-year-old patient unsure about whether to continue her pregnancy. Time wasn’t on her side, Beene told the girl.

“What if it were too late to get her an abortion? What would they do? And I just, I felt sick to my stomach,” Beene said. “Nobody had ever asked me a question like that before.”

Beene felt she had to do something. She drafted a letter to a state lawmaker about the dangers of abortion bans, then another doctor reached out with an idea to get dozens of doctors to sign on. The effort took off. About 1,000 doctors signed that letter, and they later published it as a full-page ad in The Columbus Dispatch.

Beene felt momentum building within the medical community and decided to help use that energy to form the Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights coalition. Now, Beene and the coalition are working to pass a citizen-led amendment to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution. The state’s six-week ban on abortion was blocked by a judge in October 2022.

The group is a part of an emerging political force: doctors on the front lines of the reproductive rights debate. In many states, the fight to protect reproductive rights is heating up as 14 states have outlawed abortion. Doctors who previously never mixed work with politics are jumping into the abortion debate by lobbying state lawmakers, campaigning, forming political action committees and trying to get reproductive rights protected by state law.

Reasons to vote NO on Issue 1:

ARGUMENTS AGAINST ISSUE 1

The following argument was prepared by senators Paula Hicks-Hudson and Vernon Sykes along with representatives Dontavius Jarrells, Bride Rose Sweeney and Dani Isaacsohn…

This amendment would destroy citizen-driven ballot initiatives as we know them, upending our right to make decisions that directly impact our lives. It takes away our freedom by undermining the sacred principle of ‘one person, one vote’ and destroys majority rule in Ohio.

Last year, Ohio politicians eliminated August special elections saying, “Interest groups often manipulatively put issues on the ballot in August because they know fewer Ohioans are paying attention.”

And yet here we are, voting in August on just one question: should Ohio permanently abolish the basic constitutional right of majority rule?

Special interests and corrupt politicians say yes. They don’t like voters making decisions, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules to get what they want: even more power.

Here’s why we’re confident Ohio citizens will resoundingly vote NO:

  • Issue 1 Ends Majority Rule: It means just 40% of voters can block any issue, putting 40% of voters in charge of decision-making for the majority.
  • Issue 1 Shreds Our Constitution: It would permanently undo constitutional protections that have been in place for over 100 years to check politicians’ power at the ballot box.
  • Issue 1 Takes Away Our Freedom: It would destroy citizen-driven ballot initiatives as we know them, guaranteeing that only wealthy special interests could advance changes to our constitution.
  • Issue 1 Applies to All Issues: If this amendment passes, it will apply to every single amendment on any issue Ohioans will ever vote on – you name it, just 40% of voters will decide.

We all deserve to make decisions that impact our lives. We must protect our freedom to determine our future, not permanently change our constitution to give up our rights. Vote NO.

Categories Elections, Gender, Health, Ohio, Science

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

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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