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Jennifer Rubin: Florida Is the State Where Kindness and Decency Go to Die

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
47

Jennifer Rubin is a super-smart journalist-lawyer who became a regular columnist for The Washington Post, where she was supposed to express conservative views. However, the election of Trump changed her political outlook. Here, she writes about how Ron DeSantis’ hate policies are hurting the state of Florida.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his obedient Republican legislature have made bullying and attacking the vulnerable the hallmarks of their governance. Whether it is “don’t say gay” legislation (and retribution against Disney for supporting inclusion), denying medical care to transgender youths, muzzling teachers and professors who address systemic racism in the United States, firing a county prosecutor who dared object to DeSantis’s refusal to protect women’s bodily autonomy, or shipping unwary immigrants to other states, Florida has become not where “woke” died but rather where empathy, decency and kindness go to die.


DeSantis’s stunts frequently fail in court and cost taxpayers money. But his MAGA war on diversity and tolerance might be negatively impacting the state in other ways.


DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. “An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,” according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.

Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”

In addition, evidence points to a brain drain from Florida universities and colleges, although data is hard to come by. Records show “an upward tick in staff departures at some of Florida’s largest universities. … Across the State University System, the murmurs are getting louder: Some Florida schools are having trouble filling positions,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. “At the University of Florida, 1,087 employees resigned in 2022 — the only time in the last five years that the number exceeded 1,000.” Record numbers of faculty are not returning to University of Central Florida, Florida State University and the University of South Florida. This is hardly surprising, given DeSantis’s assault on academic independence and his suggestion that students go out of state if they want to study topics such as African American studies.

In addition, some businesses might be getting cold feet about spending convention dollars in the Sunshine State. The Sun Sentinel reported, “Broward County has lost more than a half-dozen conventions as their organizers cite the divisive political climate as their reason to stay out of Florida.” If the trend continues, the significant share of jobs and state revenue attributable to convention business could shrink. DeSantis and his supporters counter that tourism is still booming. They insist low taxes will continue to attract the wealthy and businesses.

There is little sign that the rest of the country is enamored of censorship, book bans or anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. The question remains whether DeSantis’s act wears thin at home.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Higher Education, History, Injustice

John Thompson: Oklahoma Superintendent Contends that Tulsa Race Massacre Was Not About Race

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2023 //
332

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, describes how State Superintendent Ryan Walters tied himself up in verbal knots trying to explain why the Tulsa race massacre wasn’t about race or racism.

He writes:

I’ve been teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre, and discussing Critical Race Theory since the 1990s, but I finally learned the true facts about both, when “Oklahoma school officials announced plans Friday to begin teaching students that the Tulsa Race Massacre was a crime of passion that resulted from loving Black people too much.” The State Superintendent, Ryan Walters, explained:

It’s important that students are educated on how this horrifying event—which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the destruction of Black Wall Street—only happened because of how electric and wild the love was between white people and Black people at the time. … White people had been getting jealous because their African American counterparts were doing too well economically and couldn’t hang out as much as they used to. “We often end up hurting the people we love the most, and … Sometimes burning down more than 35 city blocks and 1,250 homes is the only way to express the fiery passion of your love for someone.”

Walters further explained that “the Tulsa Race Massacre had been left out of history books out of respect for Black people’s privacy.”

Okay, that was the narrative told by The Onion. But, still, it leaves open the question: which is crazier, The Onion’s satire or Superintendent Walters’ claims?

As KFOR T.V. and the Oklahoman reported, Walters spoke at Republican event at a library where “Silence!: Intense, heated moments” took over. He “was asked three times by someone in the crowd why the Tulsa Race Massacre doesn’t fall under his definition of Critical Race Theory (CRT).” The next day, Walters supposedly “walked back his statements. ‘I am referring to individuals who carried out the crime. They didn’t act that way because they were white, they acted that way because they were racist.’” And, as reported by The Frontier, Walters has also said,

“The media is twisting two separate answers. They misrepresented my statements about the Tulsa Race Massacre in an attempt to create a fake controversy.”

Reading the transcript of the meeting, it’s hard to understand Walters’ weird words, but it is impossible to deny he was saying contradictory things – that the Tulsa Massacre should be taught in school while also saying that the role of race, when it is mentioned in terms that he see as CRT ideology, is making whites feel bad about the history of violent racism, and that is banned by HB 1776.

Walters said:

Folks, I believe this is absolutely the greatest country in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. That doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes. … The only way our kids have the ability to learn from history and make this country continue to be the best country is to understand those times we fell short, a very clear, very direct understanding of those events.

Walters then may have tried to explain his understanding of the “mistakes” made during the Tulsa massacre where members of one race committed mass murder of persons of another race. But Walters’ words – that threaten schools and teachers – were incomprehensible. And as the Oklahoman noted, “Two Oklahoma school districts had their accreditation downgraded for touching on topics of race and privilege, and educators risk having their teaching license revoked.”

An audience member pushed further and asked, “How does the Tulsa Race Massacre not fall under your definition of CRT?” Walters then replied, “I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of your color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or in or are inherently racist. That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals.” But with critical race theory:

You’re saying that race defines a person. I reject that. So I would say you be judgmental of the issue, of the action, of the content of the character of the individual. Absolutely. But let’s not tie it to the skin color instead of the skin color determine it.

So an audience member then asked, “How does the Tulsa Race Massacre not fall under your definition of CRT?” Walters replied, “I answered it. That’s my answer. Again, I felt like…. (inaudible)”

So, what did Walters mean when he said the Tulsa Massacre and/or CRT should not be tied “to the skin color instead of the skin color determine it?”

The next day, after having the time to choose his words carefully, Walters said he wanted to be “crystal clear” that the “The Tulsa Race Massacre is a terrible mark on our history. The events on that day were racist, evil, and it is inexcusable.” But he didn’t seem to explain what could be taught about the “mistake,” the mass murder of around 300 Black people by a white mob, “Folks, I believe this is absolutely the greatest country in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. That doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes.”

Categories Bigotry, Failure, History, Oklahoma, Race, Racism

Peter Greene: Oklahoma Superintendent Tries to Define “Woke,” But Can’t

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
86

Peter Greene discovered that Ryan Walters, the State Superintendent of Education in Oklahoma, attempted to define “Woke” on a far-right website. WOKE is one of those new terms of opprobrium, like “critical race theory,” that Republicans despise but can’t define. Peter eagerly read Walters’ effort to defund Woke, but came away disappointed. It seems that Woke is whatever you don’t like. You may have seen the stories recently about Walters insisting that the Tulsa race massacre of 2021 had nothing to do with skin color, although as the Daily Beast reported, “white mobs killed as many as 300 Black residents and burned some 1,600 homes and businesses in what was known as Black Wall Street.”

Peter Greene writes:

Oklahoma’s head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question–what the heck does “woke” mean? (I’ll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don’t recommend clicking through).

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I’m a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the “to wit” and remember that “restore back” is more clearly “restore.”

But he’s right. The term “woke” does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, “restore American education back to its foundation” is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don’t Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn’t. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at “opponents of this movement.” If we don’t know what the movement is, we don’t know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let’s press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they’re terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It’s a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it’s okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what “woke” actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well….

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don’t even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he’s talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he’s not going to do that. He’s going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that “naturally, this faction of individuals” is after schools to spread their “radical propaganda.” Still no definition of woke in sight. No–wait. This next start looks promising–

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That’s not helping, either. “Projection” is an odd choice–when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn’t change. There’s “projection” when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here (“I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world”) but that’s probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one “forces” projection. “Inaccurately-held” is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they’re being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple “inaccurate” would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are “anti-education,” because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect “education” means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of “nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means” which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Gender, History, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Oklahoma, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

Greg Olear: Leonard Leo, the Man Who Stacked the Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2023 //
31

Greg Olear is a novelist and journalist who writes a blog called PREVAIL. The following post appeared there. I post only part of it. If you want to see his complete list of Leonard Leo’s claque, open the link and continue reading. This is part one of a two-part report.

Greg Olear writes:

He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the country. His spiderweb of connections is extensive. But most Americans, including many working in Washington, have never heard of him.

Occupying the center of an intricate web of political, legal, religious, and business connections, Leonard Leo is the quintessential Man in the Middle, a veritable dark-money spider. Like a spider, he is patient, painstaking, relentless, and much more powerful that he appears. And like a spider, he prefers to stay hidden.

I first wrote about him in February 2021, in a piece called “Leo the Cancer.” Leo, who I described as “a dandier George Constanza, or if The Penguin worked at Jones Day,” has, I explained,

made himself one of the most powerful figures in the United States. He’s put five—count ‘em, five!—justices on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, and John Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, he quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals). In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. He’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really is the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. I mean, there are only three branches of government. One of those three—arguably the most important one—is Leonard Leo’s domain.

When I began researching that piece, I didn’t know much about the guy beyond his silly, comic-book-villain name. I was surprised to discover that he was, like me, a middle-class product of Catholic upbringing and Italian descent who graduated from a public high school in New Jersey—not at all the well-heeled, oenophilic Master of the Universe he has become. He’s also much younger than I expected; born in 1965, he’s solidly Gen X—only seven years older than Yours Truly.

Yet Leonard Leo, somehow, is the individual most responsible for stripping away federal abortion rights. (The anniversary of the odious Dobbs decision was this past weekend.) As his admiring chum Ed Wheelan presciently wrote in 2016, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.”

As Politico reported—and as I outlined on these pages three months ago—Leo has been rewarded handsomely for his troubles. “I personally don’t believe that Leonard is motivated by greed,” Steven Calabresi, who founded the Federalist Society with Leo and still runs the organization, told Politico. “I think Leonard is motivated by ideology and ideas. I do think he likes to live a high-rolling lifestyle, but I don’t think he’s in the business because of the money.”

To be fair, Leo does spread that money around. He endows more organizations than I can succinctly list here. Friends like Ginni Thomas get a taste. He brings his SCOTUS cronies on lavish fishing trips with his billionaire backers. And yet Payoff Lenny—as I call him—has amassed a fortune for himself, and spends that fortune lavishly: on tailored suits, palatial vacation homes in Maine, and bottles of wine that cost more that what most Americans pay for a month’s rent.

Jesus liked wine, yes, and Jesus hung out with fishermen, sure, but I’m not sure the Son of God would approve of Leo’s stockpile of dirty loot—although his fellow Knights of Malta don’t seem to mind. Money washes away a lot of sins, as anyone familiar with the history of the Catholic Churchwell knows.

And so the rich and powerful Leonard Leo presides spider-like over Washington, moving chess pieces across the great board, raising unfathomably vast sums of money, and cultivating his extensive network, which I have attempted to map out here.

Note: Leo has so many connections that it became unwieldy to confine them to a single dispatch. In today’s installment, I will cover the judges, non-profiteers, lawyers, media members, and titled Europeans. Part Two will focus on the billionaire donors, the politicians, and the religious contacts.

Judges

Antonin Scalia (1936-2016), Clarence Thomas (b. 1948), John Roberts (b. 1955), Sam Alito (b. 1950)
Supreme Court justices

Leonard Leo worshiped at the altar of Scalia, has been close with Thomas for decades and regards him as a sort of godfather, and worked maniacally to secure the confirmations of Roberts and Alito. Thomas and Alito, in particular, he remains tight with, as recent reporting by ProPublica has made clear.

Regarding Alito, the author of the dreadful Dobbs decision: in his 2018 Daily Beast piece on Leo, Jay Michelson points out that “few people had heard of [Alito] before Leo first promoted him.” Alas, we’ve all heard of that sneeringly arrogant dickhead now.

To learn more about Leonard Leo’s circle, open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom, Gender, History, Injustice, Justice, Republicans

Reader: The Founding Fathers Did Not Want a Christian Nation

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2023 //
153

A reader called Quickwrit posted this comment about the clear intent of the Founding Fathers. Based on the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and their own writings, the Founding Fathers left no doubt about the role of religion in the new nation. They wanted the government neither to support it or to regulate it, and they wanted everyone to practice their religion without hindrance. They most certainly did not want a “Christian nation” or government subsidy of religion. These are the conditions required for freedom of religion.

Quickwrit wrote:

Freedom from religion

Right in the very First Amendment of our Constitution, our Founding Fathers outlawed religion in American government at any level. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, primary author of our Declaration of Independence, explained that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was written to create “a wall of separation” between our government and any religion. The U.S. Supreme Court holds that the Establishment Clause means that “Neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion or all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force…a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.”

Our Founding Fathers also wrote in Article VI of our Constitution that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

In short, our Constitution was written to remove all religion from our government at any level, while also allowing citizens to practice any religion they want. ANY religion.

Our Founding Fathers refused to even include any mention of God in our Constitution.

Why did our Founding Fathers do this?

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers and colonists everywhere hated the fact that they had been forced to join the official Christian religion of the British government, the Anglican Church. The penalty for not joining was that the church-controlled British colonial governments would tax their property to the point that would bankrupt them. Our Founding Fathers knew first-hand that a religion-based government led to persecution of anyone who did not share the beliefs of the official government religion. So, they constitutionally banned religion of any kind from every corner of our federal and state governments.

America’s key Founding Fathers — such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin — were NOT CHRISTIANS. They were DEISTS who had been forced to become members of a Christian church. They almost never even used the word “God” but instead used words like “Creator” or “Providence” to refer to what Deists consider to be the Supreme Being.

Thomas Jefferson, whom we honor as the author of our Declaration of Independence, was so greatly angered by the Christian claim that Jesus was God that Benjamin Franklin had to reel him in from publishing a scathing attack on Christianity. So, instead, Jefferson — who admired the social teachings of Jesus — sat down with a New Testament and cut out all references in it to Jesus being God. Then, he published the result as his Bible and it became popular throughout America. The Jefferson non-Christian social Bible also became the official Bible of Congress and for decades was given to each newly-elected member of Congress.

Categories Democracy, Freedom, History, Religion, Separation of church and state

“Democracy”: The GOP War on the Founding Fathers’ Vision

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2023 //
19

A blog reader who identifies as “Democracy” argues that today’s Republican Party, which prizes individualism over the common good has abandoned the vision of the Founding Fathers.

It appears that Ron DeSantis and the entirety of the Republican Party is in direct opposition to American history and the United States Constitution.

The Founders envisioned a democratic society “in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They agreed with John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the main reason people create government –– is to protect their persons through –– as historian R. Freeman Butts put it –– a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.” The goal was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.”

The Preamble – the stated purposes – of the Constitution, reads

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

In Article I, Section 8 of that document, the legislative branch is given broad, specific powers (among them taxing, borrowing money, regulating commerce, coining money and regulating its value, etc.). Indeed, Article I, Clause 1 gives Congress the power to tax for “the common defence and general Welfare of the United States.” Clause 18 of Section 8 stipulates that Congress had the power “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.”

Two Supreme Court decisions early in the republic’s history –– both unanimous –– supported and cemented a broad – liberal – interpretation of the implied powers of Congress.

Republicans call them “socialism.”

In 1819 (McCullough v. Maryland) the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the U.S. government was “a Government of the people. In form and in substance, it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit.”

The Court explicitly reaffirmed that one of the critical purposes of government under the U.S. Constitution is to promote the general welfare “of the people.”

In that case, Chief Justice Marshall wrote this about the necessary and proper clause:

“the clause is placed among the powers of Congress, not among the limitations on those powers.” And he added this: “Its terms purport to enlarge, not to diminish, the powers vested in the Government. It purports to be an additional power, not a restriction.”

In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) Chief Justice Marshall wrote this about the Congressional commerce power:

“This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution.”

The history of the United States, and the Constitution, over time, reflect progressive changes. The American Revolution was a progressive movement inspired by the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers; conservatives opposed it. The early expansion of voting rights to those who didn’t own land was progressive, and conservatives of the day fought
against it. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory, a purchase that doubled the size of the fledgling United States, rested on a liberal interpretation of constitutional authority. U.S. government funding of roads and canals relied on a liberal perspective of Congressional commerce power. Those roads and canals were instrumental to economic growth and prosperity, not unlike federal funding of interstate highways, the Internet, medical research, and health care.

And yet, the Republican Party is filled with people who basically reject all of this in favor of sedition.

As David Blight, Yale professor of American history put it,

“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.

Obviously, public education has a central – critical – role to play here. Here’s how Will and Ariel Durant explained it in ‘The Lessons of History’ (1968):

“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.”

Republicans: The New Confederacy
Categories Democracy, Democrats, DeSantis, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, History, Lies, Republicans, Trump

The Pop Culture That I Grew Up in

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2023 //
120

A friend from my college class shared this video, which is a montage of pop culture in the 1950s.

All the girls were beautiful, the guys were handsome, the dances were fast and frenetic. The highest achievement was getting that handsome guy to kiss your lips. Ah, those were the days.

A nagging feeling told me that these gorgeous women made me feel inadequate and ungainly. There must have been millions of girls like me, feeling somehow diminished by this feminine ideal of pulchritude.

I’m posting this because today is my birthday, and it’s a good day to wallow in the past. We were so hopeful then and believed that progress was inevitable. As more people were educated, we assumed, we would have a society that got better and better for everyone. We were naive.

Categories History, Personal

Heather Cox Richardson: The Supreme Court Is Putting Our Democracy at Risk

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2023 //
87

This is one of the best letters that Heather Cox Richardson has written since I started reading her posts. It puts the current Supreme Court’s radical decisions into historical perspective. This Court, hand-picked by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, is engaged in a shameless effort to move the clock back to the world as it existed before the New Deal. This Court threatens our democracy and our rights.

She writes:

Today the Supreme Court followed up on yesterday’s decision gutting affirmative action with three decisions that will continue to push the United States back to the era before the New Deal.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the court said that the First Amendment protects website designer Lorie Smith from having to use words she doesn’t believe in support of gay marriage. To get there, the court focused on the marriage website designer’s contention that while she is willing to work with LGBTQ customers, she doesn’t want to use her own words on a personalized website to celebrate gay marriages. Because of that unwillingness, she said, she wants to post on her website that she will not make websites for same-sex weddings. She says she is afraid that in doing so, she will run afoul of Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, which prevent public businesses from discriminating against certain groups of people.

This whole scenario of being is prospective, by the way: her online business did not exist and no one had complained about it. Smith claims she wants to start the business because “God is calling her ‘to explain His true story about marriage.’” She alleges that in 2016, a gay man approached her to make a website for his upcoming wedding, but yesterday, Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic reported that, while the man allegedly behind the email does exist, he is an established designer himself (so why would he hire someone who was not?), is not gay, and married his wife 15 years ago. He says he never wrote to Smith, and the stamp on court filings shows she received it the day after she filed the suit.

Despite this history, by a 6–3 vote, the court said that Smith was being hurt by the state law and thus had standing to sue. It decided that requiring the designer to use her own words to support gay marriage violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Taken together with yesterday’s decision ruling that universities cannot consider race as a category in student admissions, the Supreme Court has highlighted a central contradiction in its interpretation of government power: if the Fourteenth Amendment limits the federal government to making sure that there is no discrimination in the United States on the basis of race—the so-called “colorblind” Constitution—as the right-wing justices argued yesterday, it is up to the states to make sure that state laws don’t discriminate against minorities. But that requires either protecting voting rights or accepting minority rule.

This problem has been with us since before the Civil War, when lawmakers in the southern states defended their enslavement of their Black (and Indigenous) neighbors by arguing that true democracy was up to the voters and that those voters had chosen to support enslavement. After the Civil War, most lawmakers didn’t worry too much about states reimposing discriminatory laws because they included Black men as voters first in 1867 with the Military Reconstruction Act and then in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and they believed such political power would enable Black men to shape the laws under which they lived.

But in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that it was legal to cut citizens out of the vote so long as the criteria were not about race. States excluded women, who brought the case, and southern states promptly excluded Black men through literacy clauses, poll taxes, and so on. Northern states mirrored southern laws with their own, designed to keep immigrants from exercising a voice in state governments. At the same time, southern states protected white men from the effects of these exclusionary laws with so-called grandfather clauses, which said a man could vote so long as his grandfather had been eligible.

It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder.

Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.”

In the 1930s the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt undermined this coalition by using the federal government to regulate business and provide a social safety net. In the 1940s and 1950s, as racial and gender atrocities began to highlight in popular media just how discriminatory state laws really were, the Supreme Court went further, recognizing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration that states could not deprive any person of the equal protection of the laws meant that the federal government must protect the rights of minorities when states would not. Those rules created modern America.

This is what the radical right seeks to overturn. Yesterday the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment could not address racial disparities, but today, like lawmakers in the 1870s, it signaled that it would not protect voting in the states either. It rejected a petition for a review of Mississippi’s strict provision for taking the vote away from felons. That law illustrates just how fully we’re reliving our history: it dates from the 1890 Mississippi constitution that cemented power in white hands. Black Mississippians are currently 2.7 times more likely than white Mississippians to lose the right to vote under the law.

The court went even further today than allowing states to choose their voters. It said that even if state voters do call for minority protections, as Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws do, states cannot protect minorities in the face of someone’s religious beliefs. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that for “the first time in its history,” the court has granted “a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

It is worth noting that segregation was defended as a deeply held religious belief.

Today, using a case concerning school loans, the Supreme Court also took aim at the power of the federal government to regulate business. In Biden v. Nebraska the court declared by a vote of 6 to 3 that President Biden’s loan forgiveness program, which offered to forgive up to $20,000 of federally held student debt, was unconstitutional. The right-wing majority of the court argued that Congress had not intended to give that much power to the executive branch, although the forgiveness plan was based on law that gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs…as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a…national emergency…to ensure” that “recipients of student financial assistance…are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of [the national emergency]”.

The right-wing majority based its decision on the so-called major questions doctrine, invented to claw back regulatory power from the federal government. By saying that Congress cannot delegate significant decisions to federal agencies, which are in the executive branch, the court takes on itself the power to decide what a “significant” decision is. The court established this new doctrine in the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agencycase, stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate certain kinds of air pollution.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” constitutional analyst Ian Millhiser wrote today in Vox, today’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska “is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as ‘major questions’ which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.”

Today’s Supreme Court, packed as it has been by right-wing money behind the Federalist Society and that society’s leader, Leonard Leo, is taking upon itself power over the federal government and the state governments to recreate the world that existed before the New Deal.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called out the lurch toward turning the government over to the wealthy, supported as it is by religious footsoldiers like Lorie Smith: “Today, the court substituted itself for Congress,” Cardona told reporters. “It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents. They had no problem handing trillion-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super wealthy.”

Cardona made his point personal: “And many had no problems accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans, like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven. He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today. Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven. He represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven. She represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.”

In the majority opinion of Biden v. Nebraska, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that those who dislike the court’s decisions have accused the court of “going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” He defended the court’s decision and urged those who disagreed with it not to disparage the court because “such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.” But what is at stake is not simply these individual decisions, whether or not you agree with them; at stake is the way our democracy operates.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute didn’t offer much hope for Roberts’s plea. “It is not just the rulings the Roberts Court is making,” he tweeted. “They created out of [w]hole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

In a shot across the bow of this radical court, in her dissent to Biden v. Nebraska, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

—

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Billionaires, Cardona, Miguel, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Gender, Higher Education, History, Inequity, Injustice, Justice, Race, Racism, Religion, Shame, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

John Thompson: The Misinterpretation of NAEP Data

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2023 //
69

John Thompson writes here about the negative consequences of shallow reporting on NAEP data. Reporters are sensitive to whether scores are up or down, but tend to ignore contextual factors that may play a role in student performance.

He writes:

Despite the problems with education metrics, the decline in the nation’s 2022 math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test is worrisome – if we look at the big picture. 

As Diane Ravitch explained, the decline in scores during the pandemic was a “duh” moment. Rather than publishing panicky headlines, these predictable drops in scores should be seen in the broader context of the decade of declines which followed the implementation of rushed and simplistic corporate school reforms. And, as we should have done previously, we must acknowledge what reformers should have previously understood – meaningful increases in learning require inter-connected, holistic team efforts, as opposed to metric-driven instructional shortcuts.    

And we should also listen to Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers the tests. “The new data, she said, ‘reinforces the fact that recovery is going to take some time.” Carr and other experts also warn that the “academic decline is part of a broader picture that includes worsening school climate and student mental health.”

For example, “Oklahoma NAEP results reflect pandemic-fueled decline in math and reading scores.” Eighth grade reading in Oklahoma (which reopened schools more quickly than most states) declined by 7 points, compared to a three-point average national decline. Our Eighth grade math scores declined by 12 points, compared to a nationwide decline of eight points. And the state’s and the nation’s “plunge” in history scores has been worse.

But the story behind those numbers is complicated. So, before we can understand the mixed messages of short- and long-term NAEP findings, we how they have often been misrepresented by the non-education press.

Chalkbeat properly quoted Peggy Carr, “There is nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed.” And Education Week appropriately explained that all but the top-performing students saw declines, but the biggest drops were for the lowest-performing students, who were more likely to have parents who were “essential workers” who were disproportionately exposed to Covid, who were more likely to live in multi-generational households, and had the least access to medical care. Moreover, it further explained, “Reading scores for students in cities (where schools tended to be slower to reopen) stayed constant, as did reading scores for students in the West of the country.”

Yes, Covid closures led to an unprecedented decline in test scores, but many commentators should look more deeply at public relations spin dating back to the Reagan administration that inappropriately used NAEP test scores when arguing that public schools are broken. They stressed low levels of “proficiency” claiming that it correlated with grade level. And Jan Resseger explained:

A common error among journalists, critics, and pundits who misunderstand the achievement levels of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). “Proficient” on NAEP is not grade level. “Proficient” on NAEP represents A level work, at worst an A-. Would you be upset to learn that “only” 40% of 8th graders are at A level in math and “only” 1/3 scored an A in reading?

On the other hand, the admittedly unprecedented (but expected) fall in NAEP scores during Covid followed a decade of stagnating or declining NAEP scores. Moreover, the recent release of falling history scores should lead to an open discussion about why the U.S. History scores have declined by 9% since 2014.

And Chalkbeat stresses the need for conversations about the last two years, when “nearly every state has considered a bill that would limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism in their classrooms, and 18 states have bans or other restrictions in place, according to a tracker compiled by Education Week.”  For reasons I explain later, I’m especially impressed with its recommendation regarding the need for “weaving the (historical) material into other places in their (classrooms’) schedule.”

I began teaching History at John Marshall H.S. in the early 1990s during the crack and gangs crisis and after the standardized testing of the 1980s peaked. For the next 1-1/2 decades, outcomes improved at Marshall and in the nation as a whole. Marshall had serious problems, but I couldn’t believe how many great teachers it had. We had the autonomy necessary to teach in a holistic inter-connected, cross-disciplinary manner. When I saw students carrying copies of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, I had the freedom to deviate from the curriculum schedule, and teach about Ellison’s childhood in Oklahoma City, and how it informed his novel. We took fieldtrips to the Capitol, and had regular classroom visits by legislators and local leaders. And we watched excellent programs on OETA (which our Gov. Kevin Stitt recently tried to defund.).

Rather than teach to the test, I’d post the day’s State Standards, and History in the News topic. Students would drop by before class to peek at the day’s History in the News question. They quickly learned how to “weave” historical narratives into contemporary issues. 

Marshall improved more than any other OKCPS neighborhood high school until the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001’s and Race to the Top’s test-driven mandates became dominant. By the time I retired in 2010, my students who came from the poorest neighborhoods complained that they had been robbed of an education. When guest teaching up to 2020, I saw young teachers who wanted to offer culturally meaningful instruction but it was hard for educators and students to do something that they rarely saw in a 21st century classroom.

Getting back to the type of solutions discussed in Chalkbeat and Education Week, Education Watch’s Jennifer Palmer wrote a hopeful piece about a pilot program at F.D. Moon Middle School. It uses “a social studies curriculum built on encouraging students to engage in civil discourse and celebrate American ideals while also examining darker chapters of history.” The program was created by iCivics, founded by retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Its U.S. History curriculum is “based on the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, a joint project with iCivics, Harvard, Tufts and Arizona State universities.”

Palmer witnessed the energy displayed by Beatrice Mitchell’s 8th grade social studies class. All of them “passed the U.S. naturalization test, a new graduation requirement starting this school year.” This stands in contrast to a recent survey which “found just 1 in 3 adults can pass the exam … Oklahoma’s passing rate was even lower at 1 in 4 adults.”

It is unclear whether this nonpartisan program will clash with the Oklahoma Board of Education’s special report on “diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the request of State Superintendent Ryan Walters.” As Palmer noted, “Walters, a former history teacher, claimed such programs are ‘Marxist at its core.’” At any rate, it’s not just history that must be woven into other subjects. If we hope to teach critical thinking and 21st century skills, schools must abandon their test-driven silos, and teach students to be independent thinkers who listen, and learn how to learn. And, holistic instruction must be restored, as one part of serving each whole child. A first step, however, should be the non-education press shifting from alarmist headlines to meaningful solutions reported in the education press.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, History, Media, NAEP, Oklahoma, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: Indiana “Moms for Liberty” Quote Hitler: Not a Good Start

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2023 //
28

Peter Greene writes about the debut of the Indiana faction of “Moms for Liberty,” which issued a statement quoting Adolph Hitler: “He alone who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future”

Over the next 24 hours, they kept rephrasing their statement over and over, to make clear that they weren’t actually endorsing Hitler or taking inspiration from his quote. After a few contortions, they sort of clarified what they meant, I think. Your local public school is controlled by the government, so your local public school is a manifestation of Nazism.

This would be funny if it weren’t so stupid.

Ninety percent of Americans went to public schools. Are we assume then that ninety percent of Americans are fascists? Are all of us public school graduates controlled by the evil U.S. government? By Biden? Trump? Obama? Bush 1 or 2? Clinton? Reagan?

Did we get controlled when we were in school or later? For me, that means my mind went into control-mode during the era of Truman and Eisenhower. Which one am I controlled by? Or is it both?

It’s especially ironic for Moms4L to accuse anyone of “mind control” since it is they who are enthusiastically censoring what teachers may teach and banning books. If anyone is promoting mind control, it’s Moms for Liberty! It’s they who have adopted the tactics of the Storm Troopers.

A note to Moms for Liberty:

The goal of public schools is to teach children to think for themselves. The goal of religious schools is indoctrination.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Stupid
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