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Jan Resseger: Trump Is Obliterating Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
4

Jan Resseger is a social justice warrior who worked for the United Church of Christ. In retirement, she writes lucid, carefully researched articles about social policy and its effect on the nation’s most vulnerable people.

I should post everything she writes but I miss some. Here is Jan on Trump’s Big Ugly Bill and how it will hurt the neediest children and families.

This article about Trump’s assault on civil rights law was posted by the National Education Policy Center.

She writes:

On Wednesday, April 23rd, President Donald Trump released an executive order banning the use of disparate impact when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights investigates disparities in school discipline under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Under the concept of disparate impact, officials in the Office for Civil Rights have been able to document discrimination by measuring the effects of a school’s or school district’s discipline practice on the mass of the  school’s or school district’s students even when there is no proof that staff members intended to punish some students mores severely due their race or ethnicity or sexual orientation. Staff at the Brookings-Brown Center on Education Policy, Rachel Perera and Jon Valant, define “disparate impact”: “Disparate impact is the idea that school discipline policies that disproportionately harm students of color may constitute illegal racial discrimination even if those policies are… applied in an evenhanded way.”

Academic researchers have been examining unjust school discipline policies for decades. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA described groundbreaking work to define “the school-to-prison pipeline” as a metaphor for disparate impact in discipline policies across many U.S. public schools. Researchers documented differences in the kind of punishment imposed on students based on their race or ethicity or disability: “The Civil Rights Project has been working on the school discipline issues since 1999, under the leadership of Daniel Losen. Research from CRP’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies… finds that far too many districts suspend students in droves, while many others have little or no racial disparities and adhere to the common sense philosophy that suspensions, expulsions and arrests are strictly measures of last resort.”

In her new book, Original Sins, sociologist Eve Ewing describes how a punitive, prison-like, school culture, including systemic disparate impact, can infuse a school’s treatment of different groups of students because individual teachers and staff just get caught in the system in which they operate every day: “As sociologist Carla Shedd has written, the ‘routines and rituals’ created by carceral logic—everything from interacting with police officers in schools to strict uniform codes of conduct—become integral to the way a school functions, and can ultimately undermine the ostensibly educational purpose of the school building by making students feel unsafe… From within the space of the school, such regimes of discipline can become so routine that they escape notice by those who are accustomed to them.” (Original Sins, pp, 156-157)

For decades, disparate impact in school discipline has been at the heart of many of the complaints filed and consent decrees established between school districts and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. But on April 23, as the NY Times’ Erica Green reports, “President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law. In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of ‘disparate-impact liability,’ a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups… ‘This order aims to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color,’ said Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel at the Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law….”

Green explains: “The disparate-impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities… Mr. Trump’s order resurrects a last-ditch effort made in the final days of his first term to repeal disparate-impact regulations through a formal rule-making process… Now the Justice Department’s embattled civil rights division has halted the use of disparate-impact investigations altogether, officials said.”

It is important to note that the Trump administration has not attempted, so far, to change the law itself, but instead to amend the federal guidance and rules that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has used in its investigations.  The Washington Post‘s Kim Bellware explains: “Trump’s order directs federal agencies to ‘deprioritize enforcement’ of statutes and regulations that include disparate-impact liability, which has long enabled courts to stop policies and practices that unfairly exclude people on the basis of protected characteristics such as race, gender, and disability.”

When disparate impact is cited, the disparities are regularly documented with large data studies.  For example, back in 2008, in his powerful book, So Much Reform: So Little Change, the University of Chicago’s Charles Payne described national data indicating the widespread disparate impact of discriminatory school discipline: “According to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year, African American students nationally are suspended or expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students. In Minnesota, Black students are six times as likely to be suspended as whites, but that seems downright friendly compared to New Jersey, where they are almost 60 times more likely to be expelled. In 21 states, the percentage of Black suspensions is more than double their percentage in the student body. These disproportions affect middle-class as well as working-class Black students and there is no reason to believe that they can be reduced to actual differences in student behavior. At least some of the discrepancy seems to be about teachers interpreting similar behaviors differently when they come from students of different races… We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that African American students perceive school climate less favorably than white students or staff.” (So Much Reform: So Little Change, p. 112)

In 2014, in its own “Dear Colleague Letter,” the Obama administration announced a formal policy affirming the use of “disparate impact” as evidence in school discrimination cases. Here is constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black, in a 2016 book, Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline: “On January 8, 2014, the Departments of Education and Justice went beyond individual enforcement actions and formally announced their policy on school discipline moving forward… The policy guidance distinguished between disparate treatment (treating minority students and whites differently in terms of discipline) and disparate impact (facially neutral policies that result in racially disparate outcomes). It came as no surprise that schools cannot suspend an African American student for fighting and only send his white classmate to study hall. But the (formal policy) guidance on racial disparities was significant.” (Ending Zero Tolerance, p. 84)

In 2018, the first Trump administration tried to end the use of disparate impact as a way to measure civil rights violations by ending Obama’s rules and guidance. Perera and Valant reported: “When the Trump administration rescinded the Obama Dear Colleague Letter in 2018… it dropped any reference to disparate impact theory and defined much narrower conditions (for) OCR investigations.”

Perera and Valant add that the Biden administration did, in another Dear Colleague Letter, try to restore Obam’s rules and guidance, but they write that Biden administration’s “letter lacks a definition of illegal discrimination, information about how the federal government will enforce civil rights law, guidance for school districts on mandated data collection, or suggested practices and policies to prevent discrimination.”

Nevertheless, despite the weak Biden policy statement, President Biden’s Department of Education continued to investigate and enforce civil rights violations in school discipline based on disparate treatment.

Here we are now in 2025 with President Trump’s new executive order that attempts to cancel the use of disparate impact in civil rights enforcement altogether. Fortunately Trump’s new executive order will likely face lawsuits.  Erica Green explains why: “Mr. Trump’s executive order, which is likely to face legal challenges, falsely claimed that the disparate-impact test was ‘unlawful’ and violated the Constitution. In fact, the measure was codified by Congress in 1991, upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 as a tool in the work of protecting civil rights, and cited in a December 2024 dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.”

In the meantime in late March 2025, a month before Trump’s new executive order banning the use of disparate treatment in civil rights investigations, Trump’s Office for Civil Rights, in a move demonstrating Trump’s view of civil rights enforcement using “disparate impact,” dismissed a consent degree established in the Biden years to address discriminatory school discipline. The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler describes what happened in Rapid City, South Dakota: “For years, Native American students in the Rapid City, South Dakota, school district were more likely to be disciplined and less likely to enroll in advanced courses than their White peers. In 2010, the Education Department opened an investigation to see if racial discrimination was to blame… The original investigation found that Native American students in the district were twice as likely as White students to be referred for discipline, more than four times as likely to be suspended and more than five times as likely to be referred to law enforcement officials.”

Meckler continues: “The effort lingered until last year, when investigators came to a voluntary agreement with the district. In a 28-page letter signed last May, the federal government outlined its concerns that Native American and White students had been treated differently. The school district, which is the second-largest in South Dakota, agreed to take a number of steps, including staff trainings, better communication with parents and ongoing monitoring.”

At the end of March 2025, reports Meckler, “the Trump administration told the Rapid City Area School District it was terminating the agreement.”  But school district personnel in Rapid City did not consider the termination of the consent agreement to be a victory: “The Trump administration letter, sent March 27, came as a shock to the Rapid City Area School District, which did not ask for a change, a district spokeswoman said. She said the district plans to continue to abide by its terms, even though federal officials will not be monitoring to see if it does so. ‘While political priorities may shift, our core educational values remain steadfast,’ Cory Strasser, the district’s acting superintendent said in a statement. ‘Our mission remains to provide a safe, positive, and nondiscriminatory learning environment where all students can achieve their full potential.’ “

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Injustice, Trump

GOP Has a New Culture War Target: Superman

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
14

Democrats are tied up in knots trying to frame “the right message.”

Republicans are focused relentlessly on stupid, misleading culture war issues, invented out of whole cloth. They skillfully maneuver voters into arguing about fake issues, enabling them to sidestep their truly terrible policies and goals.

A few years back, Republicans launched a full-scale attack on “critical race theory,” which demonized any honest examination of American history. Parents turned out to school board meetings to protest the phantom CRT, which allegedly made white kids feel bad.

Republicans harped on the issue, and red states passed laws banning CRT and other “divisive” concepts. The base fell for the anti-CRT campaign hook, line, and sinker.

Have you heard about CRT lately? NO. It served its purpose. On to fomenting hate against other targets.

In the 2024 campaign, the Republican Party had two burning issues: transgender people and violent immigrants. They harped relentlessly on parents’ fears that teachers were indoctrinating their children to be gay, even to be transgender. School nurses, it seemed, were performing surgery at school so that students could switched to a different gender, even though the same nurses won’t prescribe an aspirin without parental permission.

Stoking hatred towards immigrants was equally successful for Republicans. Undocumented immigrants were here to rape and murder. When the election was over, Trump used the hatred he had stoked to unleash masked thugs to kidnap people off the streets and throw them into unmarked vans. The mass roundups continue, despite pleas by farmers and the tourist industry to leave their workers alone.

The centerpiece of Trump’s massive Big Ugly Bill was the billions allotted to dertaining and expelling the immigrants that Trump used to stoke fear and hatred.

Culture war issues are very successful for Republicans because they distract the public from what is really happening. They distract from informed discussions of the radical downsizing of the federal government, the shutdown of foreign aid, the elimination of programs authorized by Congress, the incoherent tariff wars that alienate our allies.

The latest culture war issue has been building against the new “Superman” movie. It is even more pointless than the war against CRT and trans kids.

The best description of the Republicans’ efforts to gin up fear of the new movie was written by journalist Parker Molloy, who writes an excellent blog called “The Present Age.”

She wrote:

So apparently Superman believing in “basic human kindness” is now controversial. Who knew?

James Gunn, director of the new Superman film hitting theaters this Friday, recently sat down with The Times of London for an interview about his take on the Man of Steel. His crime? Describing Superman as “the story of America” — specifically, as an immigrant story centered on the apparently radical notion that being kind to people is good, actually.

“I mean, Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country,” Gunn told the newspaper. “But for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

Pretty anodyne stuff, right? The most famously wholesome superhero represents wholesome values. An alien refugee who becomes Earth’s greatest champion might have something to do with immigration. Real “water is wet” territory here.

But in the right-wing media ecosystem, Gunn’s comments were treated like he’d just announced Superman would be spending the entire movie reading The Communist Manifesto while wearing a pussy hat. Fox News immediately branded the film “Superwoke.”Jesse Watters suggested Superman’s cape should read “MS13.” Breitbart called it “terrible,” “superficial,” and “overstuffed” — which is impressive considering they hadn’t seen it yet. One OutKick writer declared that Gunn was “obviously upset that President Donald Trump is deporting illegal immigrants by the millions.”

All because a director pointed out that Superman — a character literally created by the children of Jewish immigrants — is an immigrant story about being nice to people.

The manufactured outrage machine kicked into overdrive so fast, you’d think Gunn had suggested replacing the S on Superman’s chest with a hammer and sickle. But this isn’t really about Superman. It’s about how conservative media takes the most innocuous statements and transforms them into culture war ammunition. It’s about how the right-wing ecosystem has become so reflexively oppositional that even “basic human kindness” reads as a partisan attack.

And perhaps most tellingly, it’s about what happens when you’ve built an entire media apparatus that needs a constant supply of things to be mad about — even if that means getting upset that Superman, of all characters, stands for truth, justice, and helping people.

Let’s trace how this nonsense actually unfolded, because watching the outrage assembly line in action is genuinely instructive.

The Times interview dropped on July 6. Within hours, the right-wing media apparatus had stripped Gunn’s comments of context and repackaged them as an assault on American values.

Fox News didn’t just report on Gunn’s comments; they created an entire narrative. “Superwoke” became their branded shorthand, repeated across segments like a mantra. Kellyanne Conway appeared on the network to declare, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us.” Because apparently, suggesting people should be kind is now “ideology.”

But it was Jesse Watters who really went for it, quipping, “You know what it says on his cape? MS13.” Yes, the Fox News host actually tried to connect Superman — SUPERMAN — to a Salvadoran gang. Because he’s an immigrant, get it? Real subtle stuff.

The escalation was predictable. Ben Shapiro released a YouTube video through The Daily Wire, focusing his ire on lead actor David Corenswet’s refusal to say “the American way” in interviews. Instead, Corenswet had said “truth, justice, and all that good stuff,” which apparently constitutes treason in Shapiro’s America. “The reality that Hollywood is so far to the left that they cannot take a core piece of Americana and just say it’s about America,” Shapiro complained, seemingly unaware that “the American way” wasn’t even added to Superman’s motto until the 1950s.

The coordination across outlets was almost impressive. All the right-wing news organizations hit the same talking points within 48 hours. “Go woke, go broke” appeared in nearly every piece, because if there’s one thing conservative media loves, it’s a catchphrase that rhymes.

What’s particularly rich about all this pearl-clutching is that these same outlets constantly complain about “cancel culture” and “mob mentality.” Yet here they are, organizing a pre-emptive boycott of a movie because its director said… checks notes… immigrants can be good people and we should be nice to each other.

There is more to her brilliant critique. Open the link and finish reading. I subscribed.

Meanwhile, the actual film is getting great reviews and audience reactions. We are all in danger of being nice and kind to one another.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Republicans

Trump Administration Forces Resignation of UVA President Over DEI

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2025 //
7

James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia since 2018, announced his resignation under intense pressure from the Trump administration.

The Civil Rights Division of the Trump administration pressured the Board of Governors of the university to remove Ryan because of his support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They said that he pretended to comply with the federal demands to eliminate DEI but merely renamed them.

For the past half century, DEI was considered a hallmark of compliance with civil rights laws. DEI programs encouraged women and nonehites to enroll in higher education and to study the history of discrimination.

Under Trump, DEI has been reinterpreted to mean favoring those groups at the expense of white men and thus discriminating against white men.

The Trump administration has cut federal grants to universities that are slow or unwilling to dismantle DEI programs.

The New York Times reported that lawyers for the Civil Rights Division demanded Ryan’s ouster.

The demand to remove Mr. Ryan was made over the past month on several occasions by Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, to university officials and representatives, according to the three people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Brown, a University of Virginia graduate who, as a private lawyer, sued the school, is taking a major role in the investigation. He told a university representative as recently as this past week that Mr. Ryan needed to go in order for the process of resolving the investigation to begin, two of the people said.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer, has also been involved in negotiations with the university. She received her law degree from the University of Virginia, where she was a student in the law school at the same time as Mr. Ryan…

Mr. Ryan, hired in 2018 as the university’s ninth president, has leaned into issues like making the school more diverse, increasing the number of first-generation students and encouraging students to do community service. But his approach, which he says will make the university “both great and good,” has rankled conservative alumni and Republican board members who accuse him of wanting to impose his values on students and claim he is “too woke.”

Before becoming the University of Virginia’s president, Mr. Ryan served as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was praised for his commitment to D.E.I. programs. Harvard has been one of the Trump administration’s chief targets since it began its assault on higher education.

The administration’s attempt to assert federal influence over state university leadership decisions is also illustrative of how Mr. Trump’s political appointees continue to wield the Justice Department’s investigative powers to achieve policy goals long sought by a top Trump adviser, Stephen Miller.

Legal experts said they could think of few other instances in which an administration had demanded that a school have its president removed in order to resolve a Justice Department investigation.

“This is a tactic you would expect the government to use when it’s playing hard ball in a criminal case involving a corporation accused of serious wrongdoing or pervasive criminal activity,” said Daniel C. Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia University and a former federal prosecutor.

Categories Academic Freedom, Civil Rights, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Higher Education, History, Injustice, Race, Racism, Trump, Virginia

The Philosopher Crackpot Who Hates Democracy and Influences Powerful Tech Bros

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2025 //
6

If you haven’t heard of Curtis Yarvin, you should learn about him now. Yarvin does not believe in democracy. He believes in a society commanded by a king or autocrat. He was a prodigy as a child and now considers himself to be a political genius. Powerful men in the tech industry and politics pay him court and admire him, men like the billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Vice-President JD Vance.

Curtis Yarvin, advisor to Peter Thiel, Donald Trump

This article in The New Yorker by Ava Kolman paints a biographical portrait of Yarvin, summarizes his major ideas and describes his international standing as a philosopher of far-right leaders of the tech industry.

Kolman writes about Yarvin’s extensive range of contacts among the Trump administration and his influence on them, as well as his contact with royalists in other countries..

Kolman begins:

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called rage—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Does anything on his wish-list sound familiar to you?

It should. Trump has loaded up his administration with people who imbibe Yarvin.

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (doge), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

Yatvin’s ideas are quirky, inhumane, and extreme, to say the least:

On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy….

Yarvin’s influence on Trump’s inner circle is noticeable:

Last month, an anonymous doge adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump, who doesn’t like to read, is unlikely to have read Yarvin’s philosophical treatises about the proper functioning of a modern society–without benefit of a popular vote–but certainly Trump’s view of the unlimited, imperial powers of the Presidency are similar to those of Yarvin.

Read the article if you can access it. Make yourself aware of the man who wields an outsize influence on Trump right now.

To learn more about Yarvin’s influence among rightwing billionaires, read:

https://theconversation.com/an-antidemocratic-philosophy-called-neoreaction-is-creeping-into-gop-politics-182581

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Gender, History, Politics, Racism, Trump, Tyranny

The Stench of Censorship Spreads in Higher Education in Red States

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2025 //
8

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that legislatures in Republican-controlled states are passing laws to restrict teaching about racism or any kind of DEI in higher education. Such state laws follow the lead of Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who was first to launch the war on academic freedom, but also the policies of Trump, who has declared that he too will make war on “woke” (that is, anything that is honest about the dark side of the American past.)

Katharine Mangan reported:

Teaching social work in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Cassandra E. Simon often assigns readings that describe how the families her students might one day serve have been impacted by more than a century of housing, employment, and education discrimination. The associate professor has encouraged her students to engage in spirited discussions about race, even assigning a project in which they advocate for or against a social-justice issue.

Doing any of those things today, she argues in a federal lawsuit, could get her fired from the state flagship, where she’s taught for 25 years. Last year, the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law a sweeping bill that restricts what professors can teach about race. If any of their lessons veer into what conservative politicians have deemed “divisive concepts,” faculty members risk being reported, investigated, and potentially fired.

That kind of incursion into the curriculum is growing and prompting a flurry of First Amendment challenges from Simon and other plaintiffs. It’s a line state lawmakers did not cross early on in their push to dismantle DEI efforts, even as universities shuttered offices, laid off employees, canceled scholarships, and called off diversity training. But over the past two years, more than a dozen laws have been enacted that either limit which classes can be taught or imposed restrictions on what professors can say in the classroom, according to a Chronicle analysis of state legislation and a compilation of what PEN America calls “educational gag orders.”

This year especially “has been a banner year for censorship at a state level across the country,” said Amy B. Reid, senior manager at PEN America’s Freedom to Learn program. “The point of a lot of these restrictions is to put people on guard, worried that anything or everything could be prohibited so you really have to watch what you say.”

Some of the chief architects of the DEI-dismantling playbook have insisted that they’re not trying to silence anyone. In a January 26 letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal by Ilya Shapiro and Jesse Arm of the Manhattan Institute, the institute declared that “Conservatives Have No Interest In Censorship.”

“By ending practices such as identity-based discrimination and compulsory, politically coercive diversity statements,” these laws “protect the rights of professors and students to engage freely on all topics, including race,” they wrote.

Despite such reassurances, recent bills seeking to eliminate diversity efforts are encroaching on curricula in a variety of ways. Some states, like Texas, Florida, and Utah, are giving boards more control over what goes into the core curriculum, as well as the ability to shut down programs with low enrollments or questionable work-force advantages. Others, like Alabama and Mississippi, have erected guardrails on topics that can be discussed in the classroom.

Supporters say these laws are needed to prevent liberal professors from veering off into lessons that amount to activism. Some conservative lawmakers argue that it’s their responsibility, as stewards of taxpayer dollars, to ensure public universities are offering degrees that will help students be successful and land jobs.

Critics see these incursions as infringements on free speech and academic freedom. 

The intentions of those who launched “the war on woke” are irrelevant to the reality of what happens when their concerns are taken up by legislatures intent on stamping out disturbing but historically accurate discussions of race and gender. When red-state legislators restrict academic freedom, they do it with an axe, not a scalpel. The result is to instill fear in professors about what they teach and whether they will be fired for thought crimes.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, Higher Education, History, Racism

Steve Ruis: A DEI Abomination!

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2025 //
14

Steve Ruis alerts Trump and his DEI Police to a dangerous historical event that should be scrubbed from all the history books. It’s an example of DEI before DEI was recognized as unAmerican.

Grace Hopper directed a team that developed early COBOL applications.
Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution/Wikimedia Commons

There’s probably no programming language in history that’s quite as all pervasive as COBOL. For over 60 years, COBOL has been quietly powering 43% of the banking systems worldwide, handling a mind-blowing $3 trillion in daily transactions. And 95% of ATMs and 80% of banks still rely on it.

Wait. Look at that picture! It screams late 1950’s, early 1960’s. The team was lead by a woman! (The fact that she earned a Ph.D. in both mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College is irrelevant.) On the team are a black guy. A guy who looks to be from the Indian subcontinent and a sole white guy!

This should never have happened … at least according to Donald J. Trump, otherwise known as The Martyr of Mar-a-Lago, the senior partner of Elon and Felon, The Mango Menace, “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out) Trump, POTUS (Piece of Totally Useless Shit), Darth Hideous, $hitler, the Titanic Toddler, and President of the United States Donald J. Trump. Such combinations of the sexes and races are abominations and should not happen again.

Why, oh why, does anyone pay any attention to the ravings of this … person? Why do people obey his orders when he is clearly unhinged?

Categories Creativity, Democracy, Gender, History, Science, Technology, Trump

Jan Resseger: Trump Guts Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2025 //
6

Jan Resseger reviews Trump’s vigorous crusade to eliminate civil rights laws by inverting their meaning. These laws were passed to break the monopoly held by white men in hiring and promotions. But now, any program that favors women and nonwhites is treated as a crime. Universities and corporations that once featured their efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion are now warned by the federal government that these efforts discriminate against white men and must be abolished.

Resseger writes:

When it comes to President Trump’s threatened tariffs and his foreign policy demands, we have all been reading about the phrase coined by a Financial Times reporter: “Trump always chickens out—TACO.” But when it comes to Trump’s attack on civil rights and racial justice in the nation’s public schools, the President has been doggedly persistent.

On May 22nd, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser mused about the President’s Oval Office ambush of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as capturing how things are going in “Washington a hundred and twenty-one days into Trump’s second term: a manufactured scene of outrage about a nonexistent ‘white genocide’ ” and “a reminder of how explicitly Trump has, in his second term, defined the goal of his Presidency as a sort of racial-justice quest for white people.” Glasser describes “a President who has terminated affirmative-action decrees that have been in place for the federal government since the nineteen-sixties, unleashed a wave of arrests and deportations aimed at illegal migrants of color, gutted federal civil-right-enforcement offices, and blamed D.E.I. for just about every evil at home and abroad.”

New York Times reporter Erica Green summarizes the Trump administration’s consistent work since the winter to attack racial justice and twist the meaning of the protection of civil rights: “In his drive to purge diversity efforts in the federal government and beyond, President Trump has expressed outright hostility to civil rights protections. He ordered federal agencies to abandon some of the core tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the basis that they represented a ‘pernicious’ attempt to make decisions based on diversity rather than merit. But in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has turned to those same measures—not to help groups that have historically been discriminated against, but to remedy what he sees as the disenfranchisement of white men. The pattern fits into a broader trend… as Trump officials pick and choose which civil rights protections they want to enforce and for whom. Across the government, agencies that have historically worked to fight discrimination against Black people, women and other groups have pivoted to investigating institutions accused of favoring them.”

Beginning on Valentines Day,  when Trump’s Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Craig Trainor sent all public school officials a “Dear Colleague” letter threatening their federal funding if they did not remove all diversity, equity, and inclusion from their schools, the Trump Administration turned its sights on U.S. public schools. In March, the administration closed seven of the nation’s twelve regional Office for Civil Rights locations that have traditionally investigated complaints filed by parents and families. At the same time the Office for Civil Rights abandoned its traditional practice of carefully investigating complaints and working with school districts to end discriminatory practices. Trump’s OCR turned to directed investigations aimed at punishing school districts failing to comply with the administration’s priorities and threatening loss of federal funding. In early April, the Department of Education threatened K-12 public school districts’ Title I funding unless school leaders (and statewide officials) signed a certificate that they were in full compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as well as in compliance with the administration’s broad, and many believe mistaken, interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which specifically banned affirmation in college admissions. The Trump administration has declared that the Students for Fair Admissions decision instead bans all DEI programming and policy.

School districts and state departments of education, along with teachers unions and civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU, have put the consequences of almost all of these threats on hold by filing injunctions, which have yielded temporary stays in most of these cases, but Education Secretary, Linda McMahon and her Department of Education keep on persisting by conducting more investigations and threatening punitive consequences for school districts persisting in efforts to help particular groups of students.

In mid-May, by executive order, President Trump banned the use of disparate impact as a standard for investigating Civil Rights investigations.  For ProPublica, Jennifer Smith Richards and Judi Cohen reported: “Remaking the Office of Civil Rights isn’t just about increasing caseloads and reordering political priorities. The Trump administration now is taking steps to roll back OCR’s previous civil rights work. Last month, Trump issued an executive order that directs all federal agencies, including the Education Department, to stop enforcing cases involving policies that disproportionately affect certain groups—for example when Black students are disciplined more harshly than white students for the same infractions or when students with disabilities are suspended more than any other group even though they represent a small percentage of student enrollment.”

Smith Richards and Cohen examine how the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has reduced its capacity to process complaints and changed its procedures in ways that bias investigations to reflect the Trump administration’s priorities: “The OCR, historically one of the government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has been known for being a neutral fact-finder. Its investigators followed a process to determine whether complaints from the public met legal criteria for a civil rights claim, then carried out investigations methodically. The vast majority of investigations were based on discrimination complaints from students and families, and a large share of those were related to disability discrimination… Investigations being publicized now have largely bypassed the agency’s civil rights attorneys… McMahon and OCR head, Craig Trainor created what amounts to a shadow division. The Trump administration has ordered more than a dozen investigations in the past three months on its own, not initiated by an outside complainant. These ‘directed investigations’ are typically rare; there were none during President Joseph Biden’s administration. The investigations have targeted schools with transgender athletes, gender-neutral bathrooms and initiatives that the administration views as discriminatory to white students.”

The ProPublica reporters spoke with OCR attorneys who anonymously describe what they believe are serious violations of departmental protocol: “McMahon and Trainor created ways to divert complaints and investigations away from the OCR’s legal experts entirely. The administration made an ‘End DEI’ portal that bypasses the traditional online complaint system and seeks only grievances about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. Unlike the regular complaint system, the diversity portal submissions are not routed to OCR staff. ‘We have no idea where that portal goes, who it goes to, how they review the cases… said the attorney who said he struggles with being unable to help families.”  In other instances, “Conservative groups with complaints about diversity or transgender students have been able to file complaints directly with Trainor and get quick results… America First Legal, a group founded by Trump deputy chief of staff, Steven Miller… emailed Trainor a few days after Trump’s… executive order… (that) directs schools to stop teaching about or supporting diversity, equity, and gender identity. ‘AFL respectfully requests that the Department of Education open investigations into the following public school districts in Northern Virginia for continuing violations of Title IX,’ the letter read, listing five districts that have policies welcoming to transgender students. Senior leadership in Washington opened the cases the following week. America First issued a press release headlined ‘VICTORY!’ “

Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz reports: “The U.S. Department of Education has announced or confirmed at least 100 investigations into school districts, colleges, and universities, and other entities as it emerges as a prime enforcer of President Donald Trump’s social agenda.” Here are some of Schultz’s examples: “(F)our school districts have drawn investigations from the department over a Black student success plan in Chicago, a students of color summit in New York, racial affinity groups in Illinois, and a selective Virginia high school’s admissions policy that the education Department says appears to be racially discriminatory… The first investigation Trump’s Education Department announced was a probe into the Denver district over a high school’s all-gender bathroom, which the agency suggested was a violation of Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds.”

Last Friday, in “Trump Administration Gives New York 10 Days to End Its Ban on Native American Mascots,” Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz reported on a Department of Education demand that clearly represents the Trump administration’s twisting and tangling the purpose and meaning of civil rights protection in public schools: an attack by the Trump Department of Education on a New York law banning Native American mascots in public schools. “The (U.S.) Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights argues that the state’s mascot policy, enacted in 2022, violates Title VI because it prohibits the use of Native American imagery but ‘allowed names, mascots, and logos that appear to have been derived from other racial or ethnic groups, such as the ‘Dutchmen’ and the ‘Huguenots.”… McMahon said in a statement Friday that the department would ‘not stand idly by as state leaders attempt to eliminate the history and culture of Native American tribes.”

Although McMahon seems to believe that the logo New York has banned in the Massapecqua School District connects with the history of American Indians in the region of the school district on Long Island, J.P. O’Hare of the New York Department of Education explained that neither the logo nor the term ‘Chief,’ was used by Native Americans in the area.

Schultz lets the president of the National Congress of American Indians, “the largest nonprofit representing Native nations which has long tracked and challenged the use of Native American mascots, Mark Macarro” correct Education Secretary McMahon’s bizarre misconception of racial justice and civil rights law: “Native people are not mascots… We have our own languages, cultures, and governments—our identities are not anyone’s mascot or costume.  No political endorsement or misguided notion of ‘honoring’ us will change the fact that these mascots demean our people, diminish the enduring vibrancy of our unique cultures, and have no place in our country.”

Schultz adds: “Research has found that, for Native students, exposure to Native American mascots reduces self-esteem, their ability to imagine future accomplishments, and their belief that Native American communities can make a difference. For non-Native people, research shows that mascots are associated with negative thoughts and stereotypes about Native Americans… The portrayals are often outdated, whitewashed stereotypes, and aren’t grounded in realistic portrayals of Native people.”

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Race, Racism, Trump

Georgia: Brain-Dead Woman Kept on Life Support Because She Was 9 Weeks Pregnant

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
4

Several days ago, I posted this horrible story about a young woman in Georgia who is on life support. She is brain dead. Because she was nine weeks pregnant when her brain died, Georgia law requires that she be kept in a vegetative state until the fetus can be delivered at 36 weeks.

The political cartoonist Ann Telnaes posted this visual commentary on her Substack blog:

“The decision should have been left to us- not the state”, says her family

Telnaes quit her job at The Washington Post when her editor refused to publish a cartoon showing the tech billionaires bowing to Trump. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the newspaper, was one of them. Telnaes won a Pulitzer Prize for that cartoon.

Categories Cruelty, Education Reform, Gender, Georgia, Health

U.S. Navy Restores Almost All of the DEI Banned Books

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
11

The U.S. Navy and the other branches of the military were told by order of Trump and Hegseth to remove all books on the subjects of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In practice, this meant elimination of books about race, racism, and sexual orientation.

These were the search terms used to identify offending titles:

The 20 official search terms included in the May 9 memo included: affirmative action; allyship; anti-racism; critical race theory; discrimination; diversity in the workplace; diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender affirming care; gender dysphoria; gender expression; gender identity; gender nonconformity; gender transition; transgender military personnel; transgender people; transsexualism; transsexuals; and white privilege.

Using these identifiers, the Navy took 381 books out of circulation and off its shelves.

However, a second review restored all but about 20 of the titles.

In a major reversal, almost all the 381 books that the U.S. Naval Academy removed from the school’s libraries have been returned to the bookshelves after a new review using the Pentagon’s standardized search terms for diversity, equity and inclusion titles found about 20 books that need to be removed pending a future review by a Department of Defense panel, according to a defense official.

The reversal comes after a May 9 Pentagon memo set Wednesday as the date by which the military services were to submit and remove book titles from the libraries of their military educational institutions that touch on diversity, race, and gender issues using the Pentagon’s specific search terms.

Prior to the Pentagon memo standardizing search terms, the Navy used its own terms that identified 381 titles, including titles like “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, “Bodies in Doubt” by Elizabeth Reis, and “White Rage” by Carol Anderson.

Frankly, I have no idea why the list of banned books was pared down from 381 to only 20. The news story doesn’t explain.

Here is the original list of banned books. Most are about race and racism. The others are about gender and sexuality.

If the military is strong enough to fight, aren’t they strong enough to read about challenging topics?

Categories Censorship, Gender, Race, Racism, Trump

Trump’s Kennedy Center Agenda Features Drag Artists

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
4

The Daily Beast wrote with amusement that the Trump-branded Kennedy Center in D.C. has listed its coming attractions, and several of them feature drag performers. This, despite Trump denouncing the previous management for permitting anything that included drag actors.

Some shows that were originally scheduled cancel to protest the Trump takeover, including “Hamilton” and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

The new schedule includes one of Trump’s favorite shows, “Les Miserables.” You have to wonder whether he knows what the show is about.

But others have men playing women! Does he know?

The Daily Beast reported:

The Kennedy Center has announced its upcoming season lineup. For a theater that has supposedly banned performers wearing drag, its shows include an awful lot of men dressed as women. 

When President Donald Trump purged the Kennedy Center’s bipartisan board of directors in February and took over as chairman of the new board, he announced an immediate ban on events featuring performers in drag.

“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” he wrote in a Truth Social post announcing a return to a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture” for the storied theater.

And yet the 2025-26 season announced Monday will include Chicago, Moulin Rouge! Mrs. Doubtfire, and Monty Python’s Spamalot, all of which typically feature performers in drag, The New York Times reported.

Mrs. Doubtfire

The entire plot of Mrs. Doubtfire revolves around a man dressing as an elderly woman in order to pose as a nanny and spend time with his children after he and his wife divorce. 

Spamalot pokes fun at the medieval practice of male actors playing female parts with a number of drag bits.

In Chicago, a character named Mary Sunshine is typically a male soprano in drag whose wig is dramatically removed to emphasize a character’s assertion that things are “not always as they appear to be.”

And Moulin Rouge! features a literal drag queen named Baby Doll who is one of the courtesans performing alongside Satine at the Moulin Rouge cabaret.

Moulin Rouge and Chicago are sexually charged.

Trump said the new program would feature “family-friendly” shows. Hahahaha. I have seen all of these shows. Some of them are definitely NOT for children.

Categories Art, Arts Education, Censorship, Gender, Trump
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