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

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Dreier: The Fake “Leftwing Attack on Science”

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2023 //
10

Peter Dreier exposes here a false screed that appeared in the New York Times. Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College in California. Anyone who thinks that the Times is “leftwing” should see how gullible they were in posting a rightwing diatribe. Drier’s article appeared in The American prospect. The article in the Times echoed the complaint of authors that their article on leftwing bias in science had been rejected because of leftwing bias. But there are many reasons why an article might be rejected by scientific research publications, such as, because it’s about politics, not science. Maybe they should submit it to the New York Times Magazine.

Dreier writes:

Americans are more inclined than others to either deny that the climate is changing, or believe that human activity is not responsible for global warming, according to a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project in 2019. More than one-third (36 percent) of Americans today believe that climate change is primarily due to natural causes—an extraordinary repudiation of the scientific consensus.

Why are so many Americans wrong about this basic question?

A major culprit is the ongoing disinformation campaign waged by oil companies and other fossil fuel profiteers, led by the Koch brothers. Between 1986 and 2018, the Kochs spent at least $168 million financing more than 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and opposed policy solutions, such as a carbon tax, that would regulate the fossil fuel industry. Other fossil fuel giants, including ExxonMobil, and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry lobby group, have engaged in a long-standing propaganda war about global warming, pollution, and public health.

These efforts are part of a much broader and persistent campaign by corporate America to challenge scientific findings that identify the serious dangers their practices pose to the environment, workers, consumers, and public health. The key players include major food, chemical, tobacco, pharmaceutical, automobile, and fossil fuel corporations. They each have their own research, public relations, and lobbying counterparts, all designed to mislead the public and policymakers by discrediting science and sowing seeds of doubt about scientific merit and impartiality. It should come as no surprise that polls reveal an increasing distrust of science, disproportionately among Republicans.

“There’s an entire industry called product defense—devoted to creating studies that claim to exonerate dangerous products and activities,” explains Dr. David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health. Michaels was the longest-serving assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (2009-2017) and author of The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception (Oxford University Press, 2020). “It’s very lucrative for these mercenary scientists to manufacture uncertainty about the dangers of the corporate sponsors of their work. Their job is to pollute the scientific literature with ‘doubt science.’”

But if you believe New York Times columnist Pamela Paul, the most egregious efforts to discredit science come from the left, not corporate America. In a May 4 column, “A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up,” Paul claims that mainstream science has been hijacked by leftist activists who use identity politics, not objective facts, to judge the merits of scientific research. She based her argument on an article written by 29 academics, most of them scientists, entitled “In Defense of Merit in Science.”

That article contends that “social justice” advocates, including feminists and critical race theorists, evaluate scientific work on the gender and racial identity of scientists rather than on careful and scrupulous analysis of objective empirical facts. They even “deny the existence of objective reality,” because there is no scientific truth, but only “multiple narratives.”

To bolster their point that science has been kidnapped by leftists, including the editors of scientific journals, they claim, falsely, that “the paper was rejected by several prominent mainstream journals.” They eventually published it in something called the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a two-year-old publication co-founded by Peter Singer, a Princeton University philosophy professor, that primarily publishes articles from a conservative perspective.

In fact, theirs is not a scientific paper based on analysis of verifiable data. It is an opinion essay, filled with anecdotes and stories, making the uncontroversial claim that scientific research should be impartial and the controversial claim that leftists don’t share that view. The authors compare the alleged left-wing bias in current scientific work with the “dangers of replacing merit-based science with ideological control and social engineering” in the former Soviet Union. The paper goes on to attack critical race theory, affirmative action, and efforts to attract more women and people of color into science through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training and policies.

The paper “reads like a rant,” said Michaels, the George Washington University epidemiologist. “It’s a hodgepodge of opinions masquerading as a coherent argument about science.”

The 29 authors of this article can hardly complain that they’ve been subjected to hostility by the scientific establishment. Most of them are successful researchers who, between them, have published thousands of articles in various journals. (The co-authors include several non-scientists, including linguist John McWhorter and economist Glenn Loury, both well-known conservatives.)

The authors’ claim that their article was rejected by many scientific journals based on political criteria is false. In an interview, Anna Krylov, a professor of quantum chemistry at the University of Southern California who was one of the scientists who initiated the article, admitted to me that they had formally submitted their article to only one established journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which rejected it.

What she and other co-authors had actually done was, in Krylov’s words, make “informal inquiries” to journal editors, about whether they might consider the article. This practice violates scientific norms of submitting articles to journals anonymously to avoid potential bias. Despite her efforts to use her and her colleagues’ networks to feel out journal editors, Krylov claimed that all of them discouraged her from submitting the article because of its viewpoint, but she offered no evidence from those conversations or emails.

These authors know very well that the overwhelming majority of research articles submitted to serious scientific journals are rejected. The eminent journal Science accepts only 6.1 percent of submitted papers. Other prestigious journals have similarly low acceptance rates, including Nature (7.6 percent), the British Medical Journal (4 percent), The New England Journal of Medicine (5 percent), The Journal of the American Medical Association (4 percent), and The Lancet (5 percent).

The one journal to which they formally submitted their paper, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), accepts only 15 percent of all submissions, according to Prashant Nair, a spokesperson for the journal. PNAS’s rejection is hardly evidence of the editors’ leftist bias.

Krylov refused to provide copies of the evaluations of their article by the three reviewers solicited by the journal, but she did provide a copy of an email exchange between her and one of the editors, Zan Dodson, who asked the authors to clarify the differences between “merit” in scientific research and in other arenas, such as college admissions. According to PNAS’s Nair, the article “was sent for review, and the Editorial Board found that a number of claims made in the manuscript were unsupported by citations or additional argument. The Board concluded that it cannot recommend any particular protocol for improving the cogency of the arguments. As such, the manuscript was rejected.”

Neither the 29 authors nor Times columnist Paul seem to recognize that increasing the diversity of the scientific landscape has real benefits to the scientific enterprise itself. Nor do they acknowledge that science has often been used as a tool of oppression against relatively powerless people.

The widespread popularity (among prominent scientists and the general public) of the pseudo-science of eugenics in the early 1900s was used by policymakers to adopt laws allowing the sterilization of the “unfit” and to pass federal laws limiting immigration from Asia, Africa, and Southern Europe. It is hard to believe that the infamous Tuskegee experiment would have been conducted had there been any African American officials of the U.S. Public Health Service. That experiment, begun in 1932 ostensibly to find a cure for syphilis, led to the deaths of Southern Black men who were refused treatment for the disease.

The authors of “In Defense of Merit in Science” also say nothing about the biggest threat to public trust in science—the corporate-sponsored “doubt” industry. The critique of science by progressive scientists is not about the goal of impartial research. It is about what questions get asked and how scientific findings are applied in the real world.

It is no accident that few environmental scientists looked at the disproportionate harms of pollution and toxic chemicals on low-income and minority communities until Robert Bullard, a Black sociologist, published Dumping in Dixie in 1990. Now, many scientists are exploring the issue of “environmental racism,” using basic scientific methods and data analysis to examine the health impacts of racial disparities in exposure to pollution and toxins.

Pursuing excellence in research doesn’t conflict with advocating for social justice. When Albert Einstein participated in movements to outlaw lynching and end the use of atomic weapons, nobody questioned his credentials as a scientist.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Fake News, Hoax, Science

Literacy Experts: There Is No “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2023 //
172

Three literacy experts—David Reinking, Peter Smagorinsky, and David B. Yaden—wrote in opposition to the current “science of reading” frenzy. Unfortunately, their article does not mention the journalist Emily Hanford, who has zealously promoted the idea that American students don’t learn to read because their teachers do not utilize the “science of reading.” Google her name and you will find numerous articles repeating this claim. I wish I had been as successful in alerting the public and the media to the dangers of privatization as she has been in building a public campaign for phonics-as-silver-bullet. She is truly the Rudolf Flesch of our day (he published the best-selling Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955.)

As I have often written here, I strongly support phonics. I was persuaded long ago by Jeanne Chall in her book Learning to Read: The Great Debate that students need to learn the sounds of letters and letter-combinations so they can decode unfamiliar words without thinking about it. But I am not a believer in “the science of reading.” Different children learn different ways. Phonics adherents cite the report of the National Reading Panel (2000), which consisted of university-based scholars and only one practitioner, Joanne Yatvin, who wrote a dissent. The phonics cheerleaders ignore the ignominious fate of NCLB’s Reading First program, which doled out nearly $6 billion to promote the recommendations of the National Reading Panel but failed to achieve anything.

There is no “science of reading.” There is no “science of teaching math” or any other academic skill or study. If someone can identify a district where every single student reads at a proficient level on state tests, I will change my view. I await the evidence.

This post by Reinking, Smagorinsky, and Yaden appeared on Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post blog, “The Answer Sheet.”

Strauss introduced their article:

The “reading wars” have been around for longer than you might think. In the 1800s, Horace Mann, the “father of public education” who was the first state education secretary in the country (in Massachusetts), advocated that children learn to read whole words and learn to read for meaning before they are taught the explicit sounds of each letter. Noah Webster, the textbook pioneer whose “blue-back speller” taught children how to spell and read for generations, supported phonics. So it started.

In the last century and now again, we have gone in and out of debates about the best way to teach reading — as if there was a single best way for all children — with the arguments focusing on phonics, whole language and balanced literacy. We’re in another cycle: Just this week, New York City, the largest school district in the country, announced it would require all elementary schools to employ phonics programs in reading instruction.

This post — written by David Reinking, Peter Smagorinsky, and David B. Yaden — looks at the debate on phonics in a different way than is most often voiced these days. It notes, among other things, that the National Reading Panel report of 2000, which is often cited in arguments for putting phonics front and center in school reading curriculum, says many things about the importance of systematic phonics instruction but it also says this: “Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached.”

Reinking is a professor of education emeritus at Clemson University, a former editor of Reading Research Quarterly and the Journal of Literacy Research, a former president of the Literacy Research Association and an elected member of the Reading Hall of Fame.

Smagorinsky is a research professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, a visiting scholar at the University of Guadalajara, a former editor of the journal Research in the Teaching of English, and an elected member of the National Academy of Education.

Yaden is a literacy professor in the College of Education at the University of Arizona, a former editor of the Journal of Literacy Research, and a past president of the Literacy Research Association.

Reinking, Smagorinsky and

Reinking, Smagorinsky, and Yaden wrote:

Two of the nation’s most trustworthy news sources, the New York Times and The Washington Post, recently ran opinion pieces asserting that there is a national reading crisis and a single solution: more phonics instruction. The Times followed with a news article about how a “science of reading” movement is sweeping the United States in support of more phonics instruction.

These claims have clearly impressed many politicians, journalists, educational leaders and parents. Phonics has become political fodder with copycat legislation in state after state mandating more of it. There is now a firmly rooted popular narrative of a national crisis in reading achievement supposedly linked to inadequate phonics instruction and unequivocally supported by a science of reading. Those who question it and ask for more evidence are portrayed as unenlightened or even as science deniers, including many experienced, dedicated and successful teachers who contend daily with the complex, multifaceted challenges of teaching children how to read.

As researchers and teacher educators, we, like many of our colleagues, shake our heads in resigned frustration. We believe phonics plays an important role in teaching children to read. But, we see no justifiable support for its overwhelming dominance within the current narrative, nor reason to regard phonics as a panacea for improving reading achievement.

Specifically, we do not see convincing evidence for a reading crisis, and certainly none that points to phonics as the single cause or a solution. We are skeptical of any narrowly defined science that authoritatively dictates exactly how reading should be taught in every case. Most of all, we are concerned that ill-advised legislation will unnecessarily constrain teachers’ options for effective reading instruction.

As for a crisis (always useful for promoting favored causes), the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been tracking reading achievement in the United States since 1972. Until the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, the scores were mostly flat for decades, even trending slightly upward before covid-19 shut down schools. The decline since the pandemic is a clear example of how societal factors influence reading achievement. Given the nation’s increasing linguistic and cultural diversity and widening economic disparities, that upward trend might even suggest encouraging progress.

Less absurd, but no less arbitrary, is using NAEP scores to argue that two-thirds of students are not proficient in reading. Diane Ravitch, a former member of the NAEP governing board, has equated scores at the proficient level with a solid A. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, has said that basic level is generally seen as grade-level achievement. Adding students who achieve at a Basic level (interpreted as a B) or above, two-thirds of students have solid reading skills. In other words, the argument only holds if we expect every student to get an A. We can always do better, but there is neither no convincing evidence of a crisis nor magic that eliminates inevitable variation in achievement.

But crisis or not, is there evidence that more phonics instruction is the elixir guaranteed to induce higher reading achievement? The answer isn’t just no. There are decades of empirical evidence that it hasn’t and won’t.

In the mid-1960s, the federal government funded two landmark national studies of early reading instruction in the United States at 23 sites (districts or regions) carefully chosen to represent a cross section of the nation’s students. One purpose was to determine which of several approaches to teaching reading was most effective, including a strict phonics approach.

The conclusion? All approaches worked well at some sites and less so in others. Phonics worked best when it was integrated with other approaches and is most effective with beginning readers. The researchers leading these multiple studies concluded “that future research should focus on teacher and learning situation characteristics rather than method and materials.”

In the 1980s, Dolores Durkin, an iconic reading researcher, found that phonics lessons dominated reading instruction and that the problem is not phonics-or-not, but ineffective instruction that, as she concluded, “turns phonics instruction into an end in itself but also deprives children of the opportunity to experience the value of phonics.”

The subsequent National Reading Panel report of 2000, much cited today for its support of phonics instruction, actually reported that teaching phonics had only moderate effects, limited to first grade. The report also advocated for balanced reading instruction in which phonics was only one of many components. In Chapter 2, page 97, the report stated unequivocally, “Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached.” And it says this: “Finally, it is important to emphasize that systematic phonics instruction should be integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program. Phonics instruction is never a total reading program.”

In the early 2000s, there was the evaluation of the massive Reading First program implemented across six years in grades 1 through 3 in more than 5,000 schools across all 50 states and implemented with federal funding north of $5 billion. Teachers were carefully trained to deliver “scientific” reading instruction that included a numbing 1.5 to 3 hours of phonics instruction each day. Yet, students receiving this extensive phonics instruction scored no better on tests of reading comprehension than did students in schools providing more conventional instruction.

These findings do not mean that phonics is unnecessary or unimportant. They simply suggest that there is no basis for the conclusions that the absence of phonics is the cause for a reading crisis and that the sole solution to reading difficulties is intensive phonics instruction for all readers. Nor is there a reason to believe that more phonics is the linchpin to raising reading achievement.

Rather, the lack of evidence supporting an increase in phonics may indicate that there is already enough phonics being taught in schools. Despite nebulous claims that there is widespread neglect of phonics in classrooms, no recent data substantiate those claims. But, beyond phonics, what other factors might inhibit greater reading achievement — factors that could be addressed more appropriately through legislation? There are possibilities, grounded in data, that are at least as reliable and convincing as increasing phonics.

Here are a few examples. There is hard evidence that in schools with a good library and librarians, reading scores are relatively high. Unfortunately, in a growing number of states, libraries are defunded, sometimes for ideological reasons. The number of school nurses has declined during the ongoing assault on school budgets, which we know increases absenteeism, which in turn, decreases achievement. Kids can’t learn phonics or any other academic skill if they are not in school.

What about poverty and hunger? We know that kids who do poorly on standardized reading tests tend to come from the nation’s least affluent homes. And, there is considerable evidence that educational reforms focused only on classrooms and not broader social factors like poverty often fail. What does help is the availability of free meals, which are associated with enhanced academic performance, including reading and math test scores.

So, to boost reading achievement, why not legislate more funding for libraries, school nurses and programs to feed hungry children? The evidence that such legislation would increase achievement is no less, and arguably more, than increasing phonics. The recent declines in NAEP scores during the pandemic, which raise concerns, sharpen the point. Possible explanations include lack of internet connections, distractions inherent to home learning, and untrained and overworked teachers, not phonics.

When pressed on these points, inveterate phonics advocates play a final trump card: the science of reading. They cash in on the scientific cachet of esoteric cognitive and neurological research, often collectively referred to as “brain science.”

There are several reasons to discount that response. Many brain researchers concede that their work is in its infancy using marginally reliable methods with small samples, leading to debatable interpretations that are difficult to translate into classroom practice. They are only beginning to investigate how social factors influence brain activity.

Further, as our colleague Timothy Shanahan has argued, there is a difference between a basic science of reading and a science of how to teach reading. The two are not entirely in sync. He cites several examples of empirical research validating effective reading instruction that is inconsistent with brain studies. Just as hummingbirds fly, even when aeronautical science concludes they can’t, brain research doesn’t negate the reality of instructional practice that works.

But, like the snark, the nonexistent creature in Alice in Wonderland, the narrative about phonics persists, because enough people say so, over and over. For at least 70 years, demanding more phonics has become a shibboleth among those who see, or want to see, reading as essentially a readily taught technical skill. We’ve been fiddling with phonics ever since, while more consequential societal factors burn brightly in the background.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Health, Hoax, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Poverty

Editorial: In Florida, It’s Best to Be Woke

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2023 //
31

The editorial boards of the Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun Sentinel published this commentary on Governor DeSantis’ campaign to demonize being “woke.” What does it mean to be woke? It means being aware of systemic injustice. Did systemic injustices occur in the past? Yes. Do they occur now? Yes. Should we banish teaching or learning about systemic injustices, as DeSantis demands? No. That would mean teaching lies. Can we blame teachers or schools for the drop in scores on NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) when politicians like DeSantis require teachers to teach their students lies?

The editorial says it’s good to be woke:

Have you noticed? Gov. Ron DeSantis doesn’t smile enough. His brand is anger, especially at anything he can ridicule as “woke.”

Disney is “woke.” Diversity is “woke.” His obsession to cleanse Florida classrooms of discussions of racism was the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.”

He took over New College of Florida because it was “woke.” He suspended Tampa State Attorney Andrew Warren because his policies were “woke.”
Florida “is where woke goes to die,” he says. This four-letter word has lost much of its punch, purely from overuse.

But it really doesn’t matter whether people have any idea of what “woke” means — just that it sounds bad.

But what does it mean, really?

‘Systemic injustices’

As good an answer as any came from DeSantis’ general counsel, under questioning from Warren’s attorney in federal court.

“The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them,” lawyer Ryan Newman replied, adding that DeSantis doesn’t share that belief.

He doesn’t? No society is without injustices. To pretend that ours is is ludicrous.

The term “woke” originated in Black culture almost a century ago. According to the Legal Defense Fund, it became an “in-group signal urging Black people to be aware of the systems that harm and otherwise put us at a disadvantage.”

Those are precisely the systems that DeSantis pretends don’t exist, and that he doesn’t want Florida schoolchildren and college students to learn anything about. His hijacking of the word “woke” is ironic, to say the least.

Obnoxious objectives

His objectives, like that of copycat Republican politicians, are threefold. One is to cater to bigoted and resentful white voters. Donald J. Trump taught them the effectiveness of that. No. 2: Breed a generation of future voters who will have learned nothing about racism’s history or continuing consequences.

The third objective, not quite so transparent but equally pernicious, is to desensitize the nation’s courts to systemic economic and political injustices, many of which afflict poor white people just as much as Black people. The Florida Supreme Court bought into this when it purged diversity guidelines from the Florida Bar’s continuing education criteria.

There hasn’t been such a cynical disinformation campaign since the Daughters of the Confederacy set out more than a century ago to reinvent the Civil War and Reconstruction. In that distorted looking glass, slavery had nothing to do with the war; it was the South fighting for freedom and the North fighting against it. That’s how children were to be taught.

Writing in The New York Times, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. described how the Daughters suppressed textbooks to the extent of rejecting any that described slaveholders as cruel. Slavery, wrote the Daughters’ historian, “was an education that taught the negro self-control, obedience and perseverance.”

“Undertaken by apologists for the former Confederacy with an energy and alacrity that was astonishing in its vehemence and reach, in an era defined by print culture, politicians and amateur historians joined forces to police the historical profession,” Gates wrote. “The so-called Lost Cause movement was, in effect, a take-no-prisoners social media war.”

The racism didn’t go away when the South lost the war and slaves were freed. It fostered sharecropping — slavery by another means. It rationalized Jim Crow laws, lynchings, inferior schools and a denial of the right to vote that persisted until 1965. It led to federal housing policies that confined Black people to urban ghettos. It was evident when Social Security initially excluded domestic and farm workers on the fiction that it would be too difficult to collect the taxes.

It remains glaring today in the statistic that Black Americans, who account for 13% of the population, are 27% of the people shot and killed by police. It was evident when the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two Black members over a gun violence protest in their chamber, but not the Caucasian legislator who protested with them. It is apparent in the increasing re-segregation of public schools; profound racial disparities in income, health and mortality; and the persistence of fair housing and fair employment violations.

Exposure is essential

The remedy for injustice begins with exposure. It is essential. To conceal it is to be complicit in the injustice.

To teach American history through rose-colored glasses, as DeSantis intends, is to ignore the heroism and sacrifices that every generation has made toward fulfilling the belief that “all men are created equal.” That so many Americans have risen so often to that challenge speaks well of our nation, not poorly.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked one of DeSantis’ schemes — the law allowing educators and private businesses to be sued for making students and employees feel guilty about racism — but the destruction of the schools and universities goes on.

It’s up to the voters whether that continues. It’s better to be “woke” than silent any day.


The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie , Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.


© 2023 Orlando Sentinel

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Equity, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Gender, History, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Shame

Philadelphia: Charter School Rigged Admissions by Zip Code

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2023 //
9

Privatizers have boasted for years that charter schools are superior to public schools because students should not be confined to schools by their zip code (I.e. their neighborhood). But a charter school in Philadelphia used student zip codes to exclude kids from their “lottery.” The lottery was rigged to keep out kids from certain neighborhoods.

Each of the 800-plus Philadelphia families who applied for seats at a nationally recognized charter school thought their children had a fair shot at a spot in this year’s upcoming freshman class. Pennsylvania law guarantees it.

But some had no chance at all.

A top executive at Franklin Towne Charter High School said this year’s lottery was fixed, with students from certain zip codes shut out, and others eliminated because they — or their older siblings — exhibited academic or behavioral problems. Some children were also excluded because Franklin Towne’s chief executive didn’t want to take anyone from a particular charter elementary school, in the event he might have to pay for their transportation.

Patrick Field, Franklin Towne’s chief academic officer and an administrator at the school for 17 years, said the lottery tampering was ordered by Joseph Venditti, the longtime former CEO. Venditti abruptly resigned Feb. 27, citing health reasons, after Field alerted the charter’s board chair about the lottery issues…

The Inquirer reviewed a summary of the January lottery results showing that 205 students of 813 who applied were offered seats. The accepted students came from 22 zip codes; in 17 other city zip codes, none of the students who applied got in.

It is astronomically unlikely — with odds of 1,296 trillion — that no students would be selected from those zip codes if Franklin Towne conducted a random lottery as is required, an Inquirer analysis found.

Field, who is still employed by Franklin Towne, said he chose to alert authorities and come forward to The Inquirer because children are being cheated, and becausetaxpayers are footing the bill. Charters are independently run but publicly funded.

“As an administrator in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I don’t have a choice,” Field said. “As an ethical person, I’m just heartbroken that we’re doing this at a school that I’ve given so much of my life to.”

A high school of 1,300 in Bridesburg, Franklin Towne boasts strong academics, with a 97% graduation rate in 2021. It previously was named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education.

The charter also has fielded allegations over its enrollment practices. Though it’s required to admit students from across the city, Franklin Towne’s enrollment is primarily white — a demographic mismatch in a primarily Black school district — a concern raised in 2018 at a School Reform Commission meeting. It has previously been accused of discriminating against special-education students.

Mercedes Schneider reviewed the story and found that it sounded “fishy.” A mostly-white school in a mostly-black district? And no one knew? The selection process at this charter school has been funny for a long time.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

The “Godfather of AI” Is Afraid of His Creation

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2023 //
37

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, widely credited as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” quit his job at Google and let the world know that he regrets what he launched. where once he thought that AI had great potential to improve our lives, he now worries that it might be a grave danger to human civilization.

The New York Times reports:

Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technologythat became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.

On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work…

Dr. Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.

But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity…

After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open lettercalling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I. technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Evil, Failure, Fake, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Technology

TIME: How Voucher Programs Hurt Students

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
8

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, wrote the following article for TIME magazine:

In recent months, state legislatures across the country have broadened efforts to subsidize private school tuition with taxpayer dollars. New proposals for these programs—collectively called school vouchers—have appeared in more than a dozen states and passed as major priorities for Republican governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas. Since 2021, Arizona, Florida, Utah and West Virginia have also created or expanded voucher plans. Meanwhile, a handful states like Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have run voucher programs for years. But do school vouchers actually work? We need to focus on what research shows, and what that means for kids moving forward.

As an analyst who has studied these and other forms of school choice for nearly two decades, I’m in a good position to give an answer. And based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocatesmarket these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

And what about the students who do leave public schools? Some plans, like the currently proposed bill in Texas, restrict eligibility to students in public school for at least one year. But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic. Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

And these harmful voucher impacts from existing statewide vouchers lasted for years, with little else on balance to show for it.

What explains these extraordinarily large voucher-induced declines? Aren’t private schools supposed to be elite educational opportunities? When it comes to private schools accepting voucher payments, the answer is clearly no. That’s because elite private schools with strong academics and large endowments often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

Here’s another problem: for most students, using a voucher is a temporary choice to begin with. In states that have reported data on the question–Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin—roughly 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they give up the payment or because schools push them out. In Florida, where vouchers just expanded, that number is even higher: around 30% per year in pre-expansion data.

That kind of turnover is bad for kids, even when they’re leaving under-performing voucher schools. Not least because kids who leave voucher programs tend to be students of color, lower income children, and kids struggling academically in the first place.

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

And public support for these programs is tenuous at best, highly dependent on state contexts. Recent media reports indicate that the latest voucher push is at least partly the result of well-funded campaigns led by Betsy DeVos, the conservative billionaire and U.S. Education Secretary under Donald Trump. DeVos has championed vouchers for decades as an alternative to traditional public education in what she, Trump, and other supporters call “government schools.”

But DeVos has acknowledged the poor track record for vouchers—at least when it comes to academic impacts. Asked about the dismal results of the Louisiana voucher plan while she was a public official, DeVos avoided detailed comment, but her answer back then was as good a summary as any that a voucher expert like me could provide. That program, she said, was “not very well-conceived.”

That goes for school voucher plans today, currently spreading across the country.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Inequity, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

Maurice Cunningham: The Walton Family’s Investment in Massachusetts

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2023 //
8

The Network for Public Education has its own blog, where it posts timely articles about the attacks on public schools and ongoing strife over privatization. This is an important article by Maurice Cunningham about the continuing interest of the Walton Family Foundation in Massachusetts. Walton (and other billionaires) tried but failed to win a state referendum to allow unlimited expansion of charter schools in 2016; Maurice Cunningham played an important role by exposing the Dark Money behind the referendum, which was pitched as “saving poor minority kids from failing public schools.” When school boards, civil rights groups, teachers’ unions, parent associations and other friends of public schools saw who was paying the bills, they overwhelmingly defeated the referendum. It would have been quite a coup to plant the flag for privatization in Massachusetts, the birthplace of Horace Mann.

Maurice Cunningham: Banned in Boston (Globe): the Walton Family’s 2021 Political Team

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor and experienced tracker of dark and murky money in education politics. Periodically he rolls out some of the information that some media outlets never quite get around to publishing.

We all love us some Market Basket so imagine if the Walton family of Arkansas (d/b/a WalMart) bankrolled a takeover of our local grocer! News coverage would be constant—the Globe, the two NPR radio stations, local TV descending on shoppers to ask about their favorite possum pie recipes (it’s an Arkansas delicacy).  But the Waltons spend millions to privatize Massachusetts public schools and what do we get for coverage? Bupkis.

So read on if you dare, you’ll see this information nowhere else, the super-secret 2021 WALTON POLITICAL TEAM!

What is the 2021 Walton political team? It is America’s wealthiest family underwriting fronts that seek to influence government to achieve the policy goal of school privatization. As political scientists Kristin A. Goss and Jeffrey M. Berry teach us philanthropies sometimes act as interest groups. This political spending constitutes, as Robert Reich has written in Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing and How It Can Do Better, a little recognized and unaccountable form of oligarchic power.

The National Parents Union is one of his favorite groups to track, and he’s adding another to the mix.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Because I’ve been leaving Educators for Excellence out of these equations. E4E is a billionaire funded “teacher” house operation intended to undermine real democratic unions. Diane Ravitch explains E4E here: “It is funded by the reactionary anti-union Walton Family Foundation, the Rightwing William E. Simon Foundation, the anti-union Bodman Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation, which wants to eliminate pensions.” From 2017-2021 E4E took in $5,495,000 from the Waltons, some of which probably found its way to Boston.

As to that asterisk in 2020 the Waltons sent $400,000 to Massachusetts Parents United to establish National Parents Union, installing MPU  president Keri Rodrigues as co-founder (the other co-founder mysteriously disappeared, to be replaced as treasurer my Rodrigues’s husband). In 2021 the Waltons duked NPU another $1,200,000.

I did a search for “Walton Family Foundation” from 2017-present in the Boston Globe archives and found only five references[1] for Walton Family Foundation. None covered Massachusetts WFF’s political largess but for one letter to the editor (in response to a letter from NPU/MPU/Walton agent Keri Rodrigues) and a snippet from AP. Except . . .

For a 2021 op-ed by free-lance journalist Amy Crawford titled Do-it-yourself education is on the rise. Crawford offers a big plug for Rodrigues and wrote that WFF “channeled $700,000 into direct grants (to NPU) for technology, training, and supplies for homeschooling families, cooperatives, and learning pods, in which families pool resources to hire a private teacher.” But what I think Crawford meant was the $700,000 invested in NPU by the Vela Fund, a joint venture of the Waltons and Charles Koch. Both the Waltons and Koch seek the privatization of public schools.

The post is filled with detail and specifics of particular interest to folks who follow education in Massachusetts.

Bottom line: The Waltons spend millions to influence education policy in Massachusetts and the Globe not only keeps its readers in the dark about that but promotes DFER and Rodrigues/National Parents Union/Massachusetts Parents United as authentic voices of Democrats and parents.

Read the full post here. 

You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/maurice-cunningham-banned-in-boston-globe-the-walton-familys-2021-political-team/

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Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Hoax, Massachusetts, Parents, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Unions

Secretary Cardona, NAEP Proficient Is NOT Grade Level!

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2023 //
45

For the past dozen years, since the attack on public schools went into high gear, the same lie has been trotted out again and again to defame public schools. The slanderers say that 2/3 of American students are reading “below grade level.”

At Congressional hearings on the education budget on Tuesday April 18, the same ridiculous claim was made by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. He said that only 33% are reading at proficiency. He said this is “appalling and not acceptable for the United States. 33% of our students are reading on Grade level.” (At about 45:00).

This is nonsense. Its’s frankly appalling to hear Secretary Cardona repeating the lie spread by rightwing public school haters. He really should be briefed by officials from the National Assessment Governing Board before he testifies again.

On the NAEP (National Assessment of Educationsl Progress) tests, “proficient” does not represent grade level. Proficient is a high bar. Although the federal testing agency does not equate its achievement levels to letter grades, I would estimate (based on my seven years of experience as a member of the NAEP Governing Board) that “proficient” is about the same as an A or an A-. Do we really expect that every student merits an A? I don’t think so.

The website of the National Center on Education Statistics states clearly:

Achievement Levels

NAEP student achievement levels are performance standards that describe what students should know and be able to do. Results are reported as percentages of students performing at or above three NAEP achievement levels (NAEP Basic, NAEP Proficient, and NAEP Advanced). Students performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter. It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).

Could it be any plainer? Students who score at or above NAEP Proficent “demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” Furthermore, the NAEP Proficient level “does not represent grade level proficiency.”

Would someone please tell Secretary Cardona? When he repeats the lies of the rightwing propagandists, he maligns every teacher and student in the nation.

Someone should also inform Secretary Cardona that the NAEP achievement levels are set by panels of educators and non-educators; as such, they are subjective judgments. They have been used on a trial basis for 30 years without getting definitive clearance by testing experts commissioned by Congress to review their validity. “The latest evaluation of the NAEP achievement levels was conducted by a committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2016. The evaluation concluded that further evidence should be gathered to determine whether the NAEP achievement levels are reasonable, valid, and informative. Accordingly, the NCES commissioner determined that the trial status of the NAEP achievement levels should be maintained at this time.”

Please, Secretary Cardona, stop saying that “only 33% of American students can read proficiently” and that “only 33% are reading at grade level.”

It’s not true.

When asked about vouchers, Secretary Cardona said he opposes them because they take money away from public schools. That’s true, but far from the whole truth. 75-80% of vouchers subsidize students who already attend private schools. They are a transfer from the public to the affluent. Kids who leave public schools to use vouchers lose academic ground, and most return to their public school within two-three years in need of help catching up. Vouchers fund religious schools that may discriminate against students, families, and staff who do not share their religion or who are gay or who have disabilities. They choose the students they want.


Furthermore, religious schools indoctrinate. Some religious schools teach fake science and history. Religious schools force taxpayers to pay for religious views they do not share.

There are many reasons to oppose vouchers but Secretary Cardona seems unaware of them. I recommend that he invite veteran voucher researcher Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University to brief him on why vouchers for religious and private schools are a pernicious and ineffective policy.

Categories Data, Education Reform, Fake News, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, NAEP, Propaganda, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing

Paul Waldman: FOX “News” Is Controlled by the Monster It Created

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2023 //
3

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post shows how the FOX “personalities” lied to their audience because they were afraid the audience would go to other sites that fed the audience’s hunger for conspiracy theories. The FOX talking heads created the monster, and now they are owned by the monster. All of this is especially interesting because Dominion Voting Systems is suing FOX and others for libel, and the FOX statements show that they knew their on-air statements were lies.

On screen, Fox News personalities paint a world of clear heroes and villains, where conservatives are always strong and right and liberals are weak and wrong. But the extraordinary private communications revealed in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox show who they really are. Panicked over Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, those same hosts, and the executives who run the network, cowered in abject terror.

They feared the same monster that keeps House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) up at night, the monster that conservative media and Republican politicians created: base voters who are deluded, angry and vengeful.

McCarthy has sought to appease the beast by granting exclusive access to 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But with each capitulation, McCarthy and Fox News only make the monster stronger.

To see how, begin with the Dominion lawsuit. The company, which makes election software and voting machines, alleges that Fox defamed its business by repeatedly claiming that its systems were used to steal the 2020 presidential election. To win this kind of case against a news organization, a plaintiff must show that the organization acted with “actual malice” — that it said things it knew were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Mistakes alone are not enough.

Emails and texts sent in the days after the election appear to show exactly that. On air, Fox was spreading lies about supposed election fraud and bringing on guests without concern for their credibility, including Rudy Giuliani and GOP lawyer Sidney Powell. Meanwhile, Fox’s stars and executives privately belittled those same people and the claims they were making.

“Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in one email. Giuliani was “acting like an insane person,” host Sean Hannity declared.

At the same time, Fox News tried to suppress the truth. Reporters for the organization who corrected false claims were reprimanded and threatened. One reporter who fact-checked Powell and Giuliani was told by her boss that executives were not happy about it and that she should do a better job of “respecting our audience.” When Fox truthfully reported Joe Biden’s victory, Carlson texted his producer: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real.” When another reporter fact-checked a Trump tweet spreading lies about stolen votes, Carlson demanded that the reporter be fired.

These documents make clear not only that Fox News stars and executives think their audience is a bunch of half-wits but also that they live in fear that the audience will turn on them unless they tell viewers exactly what they want to hear regardless of the facts.

Who taught that audience to believe conspiracy theories and to assume that any unwelcome information must be a sinister lie? Fox News, of course.

Now consider Jan. 6. McCarthy knows the facts. The Capitol insurrection wasn’t a false-flag operation by antifa or the FBI. Indeed, McCarthy initially blasted Trump for his role in stirring the rioters and dismissed conspiracy theories. So why has he given exclusive access to surveillance footage to Carlson, the constant purveyor of conspiracy theories?

There’s no mystery. Carlson’s producers will comb through endless pixels to find images with which to mislead viewers: to convince them that the riot wasn’t so bad or that Trump’s supporters weren’t to blame or that the whole thing was a setup.

That will only further convince Carlson’s audience to deny the truth about Jan. 6, and punish any Republican officeholder who disagrees. As for McCarthy, will this exercise help him by making it more likely that Republicans will reinforce his thin House majority in the next election — or take the Senate or the White House? Quite the opposite. It only makes it more likely that voters will view his party as extremists and loons who are far more interested in the obsessions of a spectacularly unpopular ex-president than in the genuine problems the country faces.

Like the trembling dissemblers of Fox News, McCarthy must feel that he has no choice: Feed the beast or be eaten by it. Winning the future is an idea they cannot latch on to because they are so frantic to survive one more day.

Republican elites are not powerless. They helped make this mess and could nudge their base back toward reality if they chose. But they’re too afraid to try.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fake News, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Media, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump
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