Civics education in Texas has been turned into textbook study by a 2021 law that bans student interaction with elected officials. Apparently, the Republicans who control state government want to keep students in the dark about getting involved in civic action. Participation is a feature of civic education, but it’s illegal in the Lone Star State.
The defining experience of Jordan Zamora-Garcia’s high school career – a hands-on group project in civics class that spurred a new city ordinance in his Austin suburb – would now violate Texas law.
Tucked into page 8 is a stipulation outlawing all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials – short-circuiting the training young Texans receive to participate in democracy itself.
Zamora-Garcia’s 2017 project to add student advisers to the city council, and others like it involving research and meetings with elected representatives, would stand in direct violation.Since 2021, 18 states have passed laws restricting teachings on race and gender. But Texas is the only one nationwide to suppress students’ interactions with elected officials in class projects, according to researchers at the free expression advocacy group Pen America.
The movies taught us to believe that sometimes the little guy/gal wins and defeats the powerful. You know, movies like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” The students of Edward A. Reynolds West Side High School pinned their hopes on that scenario.
EARWSHS is a transfer school that serves students who have one last chance to get a high school diploma. Many of its students are in their early 20s. Some have babies. The school has a child care center, a large gym, a kitchen big enough for cooking classes, a health clinic, and more.
Last night the city’s Panel on Educational Policy met. They heard hours of testimony, overwhelmingly favoring EARWSHS. The PEP ignored the students and teachers. It voted to make the swap, despite overwhelming opposition.
The students and teachers at EARWSHS has passion and energy.
Some clues may be found in the fact that TYWLS is a chain of single-sex girl schools for grades 6-12, founded by Ann Tisch, a member of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in NYC. Ann’s sister-in-law, Merryl Tisch is the former Board of Regents chancellor and now the SUNY board chair; her niece is Jessica Tisch, the current Sanitation Commissioner. Andrew Tisch, her husband, is a billionaire and the co-chair of Loews Corporation. Together with his brother, James S. Tisch, and cousin, Jonathan Tisch, he runs a holding company involved in hotels, oil, and insurance companies. From 1990 to 1995, he was CEO of Lorillard Tobacco Company, and in that capacity testified before Congress that “nicotine is not addictive,” and that he didn’t believe that smoking causes cancer. He currently heads the board of the secretive and controversial Police Foundation, which has been called the “Piggybank of the NYPD.”
Ann Tisch and her wealthy friends have given millions to the Student Leadership Network, the non-profitthat subsidizes her chain of schools, to hire college counselors, trips, and other opportunities for their students. The network recently received $7 million from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. An investigation by Liz Rosenberg at NYC News service found that from 2006 to 2018, the Tisch Foundation gave nearly $50,000 to the Eagle Academy Foundation, which supports the single-sex chain of schools for boys started by Chancellor Banks.
Moreover, this year, the Student Leadership Network paid $12,000 to one of the top lobbyists in the city, Kasirer LLC to lobby Banks and other city officials.Further digging by Daniel Alicea under his twitter handle Educators of NYC reveals that they have spent over $120,000 on lobbying since 2021. A look at NYC lobbying reports shows the Network has paid Kasirer $194,000 for lobbying since 2020. As a result, they have received $250,000 in NYC Council discretionary funding every year since at least 2016. (I couldn’t find any discretionary funding for West Side High School.)
Donna Ladd, a native Mississippian, founded the Mississippi Free Press three years ago to shine a bright light on the state’s politics, history, and culture. The MFP has grown into a journalistic force. I am excited to join its advisory board, because the force of sunlight can be so powerful. I want to share Donna Ladd’s last newsletter, introducing a new reporter—Torsheta Jackson—and describing some of their exciting plans for the future. This team wants to free Mississippi from the dead hand of the past. Read Donna’s letter and I think you will understand why I am so enthusiastic about the Mississippi Free Press.
Read our latest stories from mfp.ms. And please support our work: mfp.ms/donate. Thank you! Meet Torsheta Jackson!
Donna writes:
One of my favorite reporting trips ever was touring around Noxubee County with then-freelance writer Torsheta Jackson in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because she grew up in the East Mississippi county, over on the Alabama border, Torsheta was the tour guide, driving us around in her big truck I had to lift myself into. First, she pointed out where she grew up in Shuqualak (locally pronounced “Sugar-lock”), the child of educators. Along the way, she pointed out slabs where industry, grocery stores and schools used to stand before her hometown became a shell of its former self over the decades after forced integration in 1970.
We walked around the ruins that now dominate the little downtown and talked about poverty, neglect, white-flight cycles and disinvestment in the county settled by rich white planters—including Mississippi State University founder Stephen D. Lee’s family—and built by enslaved people. The county has always been majority-Black, but usually under white control, from newspapers, to industry, to local education decisions and resources. It was also the site of vicious white terrorism to keep it that way.
In the county seat of Macon, Torsheta showed me the county’s only remaining grocery store—white-owned and too expensive in a region where hunger is far too rampant, she said. She then took me to see the library, which still has its gallows, where they used to hang people in front of crowds on the front lawn, now marketed as a tourist attraction. We looked straight out the front window of the library at the tall Confederate statue standing in front of the courthouse across the street in a town that is 82% Black. The Board of Supervisors voted in July 2020 to remove it; last I checked, it was still there as post-George Floyd anti-racism enthusiasm wanes.
Torsheta showed me the abandoned Central Academy, which the superintendent of the county public schools helped open in the 1960s, supported by state vouchers, becoming the seg academy’s headmaster. She drove me to all the now-boarded-up, or disappeared or repurposed, public schools that used to be in Noxubee (locally pronounced “Nock-shu-bee”) County before most white families fled either to C.A. or to the local Mennonite school, which also opened in 1970.
Torsheta and I spent hours in the “new” Noxubee County public school just north of Macon, talking to the principal and the school psychologist—both women she knew growing up there. We learned about the perpetual state of crisis that faces the district and its one remaining public-school system covering the entire county; district leadership was changing again that day, in fact. And, of course, we learned about the systemic challenges that face Black women and their families, in particular, in Noxubee County, from no broadband, to hunger, to mental health and more. Their honesty with us informed Torsheta’s award-winning installment of our “(In)equity and Resilience: Black Women, Systemic Barriers and COVID-19” cause-solutions journalism project. It is now the prototype of our statewide county-level Mapping Mississippi systemic-reporting strategy that we’re amping up by summer with Torsheta’s help and inspiration.
It was an eye-opening and powerful journey for us both. Torsheta would later say on MFP Live that, before that reporting experience, she had not understood fully how intentional barriers and discrimination caused the decline of her home county over the decades. After this journey into the past, she did.
It was also on that tour of Noxubee County that I decided that I wanted Torsheta as a full-time reporter to take her systemic journalism across the state and help me build our Education Equity Solutions Lab. This is a very different kind of education reporting than the partisan griping about schools and funding that we usually see in Mississippi. For me, what I called Project Torsheta started on that trip. With her years of teaching experience (19 as of now), her brilliance, her curiosity, her wit and her stunning work ethic, I knew Torsheta was the kind of reporter Mississippi needs and deserves covering education. She can show us like no one else how education’s use as a political tool hurts families, children and whole communities.
Fast forward a couple of years, and it’s happening. Report for America announced Wednesday that it is supporting Torsheta as our lead education-equity reporter to do this work, paying a chunk of her salary for the next two to three years. After two years of working together to figure out timing and resources, Torsheta and I—and our whole team—are ecstatic that our vision is happening. I cannot wait to develop this work with Torsheta, and it doesn’t hurt that we recently hired fantastic Business Manager Jared Norton to free me up for more journalism. Torsheta and I (and others) will soon be traveling the state together again, doing the systemic journalism we know can help improve this state for all of our people.
I’ll talk more soon about our second new reporter we announced this week. Heather Harrison of Copiah County is the vivacious and dogged outgoing editor of The Reflector at Mississippi State. I knew in our first conversation (and then confirmed in a team solution circle) that she is bringing the energy, passion and curiosity that it takes to succeed and thrive at the Mississippi Free Press. She’ll be our first regional full-time bureau reporter, remaining in Starkville to largely cover that region of the state and help us collaborate with the Starkville Daily News.
Needless to say, you readers are making all of this growth happen. We started with $50,000 and one full-time reporter just three years ago. You have helped create 17 good-paying jobs and pay for myriad freelancers, contractors and interns—most of them brilliant and engaged Mississippi natives staying in their home state to do the work. Our resources are mostly from readers. You get it, and you are intentionally helping us grow our team and our reach to more counties.
Please help keep us growing by giving what you can now at mfp.ms/donate. Remember, your recurring donations are paying for at least one reporter already, so every amount matters.
A “transfer school” in New York City is one that enrolls high school students—some in their early 20s—who have fallen far behind and need intensive support to graduate. The Edward A. Reynolds West Side High School is a transfer school. It has been a life-saver for students who would otherwise have dropped out. The school has a wonderful range of facilities: “the suite of services West Side has offered from its specially designed West 102nd Street building—equipped with a gym big enough for Public School Athletic League play, a working kitchen for cooking classes, a health clinic, a childcare center and a youth employment program—can be transformative.”
Unfortunately for the West Side High School, another school wants its building. The Young Women’s Leadership Academy wants a swap. As journalist Liz Rosenberg reports, the students and teachers at West Side High School don’t want to move. The YWLA building is smaller and lacks the amenities of West Side High School.
But YWLA has some advantages. It was founded by Ann Tisch, who is part of the billionaire Tisch family, who are part of the ownership of the Loew’s Corporation.
Some West Side supporters question whether the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Foundation’s support for the Young Women’s Leadership School, its backing of the Eagle Academy Foundation led by Banks until he was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams in 2022 and its working relationships with both city officials—is playing a role in the DOE’s plans.
There are six YWLA schools in the city, and more in other cities. Last year, their network received a gift of $7 million from McKenzie Scott. Over the past years, the Tisch Foundation gave $50,000 to the Eagle Academy schools run by now-Chancellor David Banks.
Will these cozy relationships encourage the City to mandate the building swap?
Or will the billionaire Tisch family use some of their assets to build or buy a suitable structure for their YWLA? It would also be a good use of MacKenzie Scott’s millions.
The 23-member Panel on Educational Policy will vote tomorrow night on the swap. Thirteen members of the Panel were appointed by the Mayor, as was Chancellor Banks.
Remember, the GOP is the party that loves the unborn but disdains the born. They value life in the womb but not actual children.
Investigative reporter Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post wrote:
When Iowa lawmakers voted last week to roll back certain child labor protections, they blended into a growing movement driven largely by a conservative advocacy group. At 4:52 a.m., Tuesday, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15 year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures. The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. And they are gaining traction at a time the Biden administration is scrambling to enforce existing labor protections for children. The FGA achieved its biggest victory in March, playing a central role in designing a new Arkansas law to eliminate work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Its sponsor, state Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R), said in a hearing that the legislation “came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability.” “As a practical matter, this is likely to make it even harder for the state to enforce our own child labor laws,” said Annie B. Smith, director of the University of Arkansas School of Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic. “Not knowing where young kids are working makes it harder for [state departments] to do proactive investigations and visit workplaces where they know that employment is happening to make sure that kids are safe.”
That law passed so swiftly and was met with such public outcry that Arkansas officials quickly approved a second measure increasing penalties on violators of the child labor codes the state had just weakened. In Missouri, where another child labor bill has gained significant GOP support, the FGA helped a lawmaker draft and revise the legislation, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post. The FGA for years has worked systematically to shape policy at the state level, fighting to advance conservative causes such as restricting access to anti-poverty programs and blocking Medicaid expansion.
But in February, the White House announced a crackdown on child labor violators in response to what activists have described as a surge in youths — many of them undocumented immigrants — working at meat packing plants, construction sites, auto factories and other dangerous job sites. The administration’s top labor lawyer called the proposed state child labor laws “irresponsible,” and said it could make it easier for employers to hire children for dangerous work. “Federal and state entities should be working together to increase accountability and ramp up enforcement — not make it easier to illegally hire children to do what are often dangerous jobs,” Labor Solicitor Seema Nanda said. “No child should be working in dangerous workplaces in this country, full stop.” Congress in 1938 passed the Fair Labor Standards Act to stop companies from using cheap child labor to do dangerous work, a practice that exploded during the Great Depression….
On the surface, the FGA frames its child worker bills as part of a larger debate surrounding parental rights, including in education and child care. But the state-by-state campaigns, the group’s leader said, help the FGA create openings to deconstruct larger government regulations. Since 2016, the FGA’s Opportunity Solutions Project has hired 115 lobbyists across the country with a presence in 22 states, according to the nonpartisan political watchdog group Open Secrets. “The reason these rather unpopular policies succeed is because they come in under the radar screen,” said David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame. “Typically, these things get passed because they are often introduced in a very quiet way or by groups inching little by little through grass-roots efforts.” Minnesota and Ohio have introduced proposals this year allowing teens to work more hours or in more dangerous occupations, such as construction. A bill in Georgia would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.
The FGA-backed measures maintain existing child labor safety protections “while removing the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” Nick Stehle, the foundation’s vice president, said in a statement. “Frankly, every state, including Missouri, should follow Arkansas’s lead to allow parents and their teenagers to have the conversation about work and make that decision themselves,” said Stehle, who is also a visiting fellow at the Opportunity Solutions Project. The FGA declined to make Stehle and other representatives available for interviews. It’s one of several conservative groups that have long taken aim at all manner of government regulations or social safety net programs. The FGA is funded by a broad swath of ultraconservative and Republican donors — such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and 85 Fund, a nonprofit connected to political operative Leonard Leo — who have similarly supported other conservative policy groups. The youth hiring or employment bills, as they are often titled, represent growing momentum among conservatives who contend that parents and not government policy should determine whether and where 14- and 15-year-olds should work. “When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular,” Campbell said. “You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with….”
Supporters of the child worker proposals say they reduce red tape around the hiring process for minors. A spokeswoman for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a rising Republican star, said her state’s law relieved parents of “obsolete” and “arbitrary burdens.” “The main push for this reform didn’t come from big business,” Stehle, the FGA vice president, wrote in an essay for Fox. “It came from families like mine, who want more of the freedom that lets our children flourish…”
Tarren Bragdon, a former Maine state legislator, founded the FGA in 2011 with a focus on cutting social safety net and anti-poverty programs. It quickly tapped into conservative political fundraising networks and grew from $50,000 in seed funding to $4 million in revenue by its fourth year, according to tax filings and the group’s promotional materials.
In 2020, the most recent year for which the FGA and its funders’ full financial disclosures are available, more than 70 percent of its $10.6 million in revenue came from 14 conservative groups.
The FGA joined the State Policy Network, a confederation of conservative state-level think tanks that practice what leaders call the “Ikea model” of advocacy, its president said during the group’s 2013 conference. Affiliates such as the FGA display prefabricated policy projects for state officials, then provide the tools — including research and lobbying support — to push proposals through legislative and administrative processes. In 2021, for example, Arkansas legislators passed 48 measures backed by the FGA, according to the foundation’s end-of-year report. It identified Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa among its five “super states” where it planned to increase its advocacy presence. In 2022, the FGA claimed 144 “state policy reform wins,” including 45 related to unemployment and welfare, across a slew of states. “Success in the states is critical for achieving national change, as it often opens the door to federal regulatory reform,” Bragdon wrote in the group’s 2021 report. “Once enough states successfully implement a reform, we can use the momentum and proven results to build pressure for regulatory change.” Yet even legislators who support the FGA’s policies expanding child labor have found their limits. Missouri’s bill was amended to require a parental permission form for children aged 14 to 16 who want to take a job. The original legislation, edited by the FGA, did not contain any such provision.
It is well known that the idea of vouchers was launched in response to the Brown decision of 1954. Southern states wanted to avoid desegregating their schools, so they created voucher laws so that white students would not be forced to go to school with Black students. (A useful history is Steve Suitts’ Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.) Some “credit” libertarian Milton Friedman as the godfather of the voucher movement, but his 1955 essay advocating vouchers would have disappeared into the mists of time without the legislation passed across the South.
The voucher idea was stigmatized for many years because of its association with segregation. But it was revived in 1990 by a scholarly book by John Chubb and Terry Moe called Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, in which they theorized that vouchers were actually a panacea. (Their word.)
We now know they were wrong. As multiple studies have reported, student academic performance is worse in voucher schools than in public schools. we also know that most vouchers are used by students who were already enrolled in private and religious schools, so vouchers are an expensive subsidy for families that like the subsidy but don’t need it.
So, why is there continued advocacy for vouchers? why do voucher advocates say that “all families should have the same choice as the rich” when the value of vouchers don’t pay for elite schools attended by the rich? Why are they sold as salvation for children when they are not?
The purpose of vouchers is to abandon public schools. As choice prevails, the community sees no reason to tax itself for private choices. Bond issues will lose. Parents whose children are no longer in school will not pay taxes for other people’s children. People without children will think, “that’s not my responsibility.” People will not want to pay for religious schools for those of a different faith. Schooling will become a personal responsibility, not a civic responsibility.
Peter writes:
We need to find another way to talk about vouchers.
As the GOP mounts a multi-state initiative to implement vouchers or super-voucher education savings accounts in many states across the country, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ve been looking at the voucher movement through the wrong lens (which is to day, the lens that voucheristas have promoted).
Vouchers are not about freeing or empowering parents. They are about empowering private interests to chomp away at the giant mountain of education money in this country. They are about dismantling any sort of oversight and accountability; it’s striking how many of these voucher bills/laws very specifically forbid the state to interfere with the vendors in any way, shape or form.
Think of voucher programs this way.
The state announces, “We are dismantling the public education system. You are on your own. You will have to shop for your child’s education, piece by piece, in a marketplace bound by very little oversight and very few guardrails. In this new education ecosystem, you will have to pay your own way. To take some of the sting out of this, we’ll give you a small pocketful of money to help defray expenses. Good luck.”
It’s not a voucher system. It’s a pay your own way system. It’s a you’re on your own system. The voucher is not the point of the system; it’s simply a small payment to keep you from noticing that you’ve just been cut loose.
Freedom and empowerment will come, as always, in direct proportion to the amount of money you have to spend.
The voucher amount will dwindle. That amount is based on what the public school system spends to educate a child, and taxpayers will shrink that amount going forward as the schools themselves shrink to holding facilities for students who can’t find a private vendor to accept them, or whose parents can’t afford what the voucher won’t cover. And remember, we’ve seen this movie before– after Brown v. Board of Education, white families in some states moved their children into private segregation academies, and then they cut public school taxes (because why keep paying taxes on the system that your child no longer used).
Vouchers are the tail, not the dog. They are the public-facing image of privatization– and not just privatization of the “delivery” of education. Voucherization is also about privatizing the responsibility for educating children, about telling parents that education is their problem, not the community’s.
We need another term for discussing this family of policies; “voucher” doesn’t begin to capture what’s truly at stake. I can imagine a world in which charter schools are a viable, even useful part of a robust pubic education system; it’s not at all the world we currently live in, but I can imagine it. But the system that voucher proponents want is absolutely incompatible with a functioning public education system. And it has nothing to do with freedom.
Misty Griffin has an important story to tell, based on her dreadful personal experience. Her story is important especially at this moment when so many politicians are repeating the mantra of “parent rights.” Misty reminds us that children too have rights, and not all parents are trustworthy. Misty wrote her story in a book titled Tears of the Silenced: An Amish True Crime Memoir of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Brutal Betrayal, and Ultimate Survival.
I asked her to write her story for you.
She wrote:
In the United States, freedom of religion has the ability to cancel out every single child safety law/regulation on the books. Children across the nation are cloistered into strict religious communities that either have their own private religious schools or homeschool their children. Most of these groups do not believe in reporting child abuse and stress the importance of severe corporal punishment and view sexual abuse as a moral failing rather than a serious crime. Children in such religions/churches/cults are left with no one in their orbit who will help them out of abusive situations. Many of these children suffer greatly on a daily basis and seem forgotten by regular society.
A bit of my story.
My stepdad was a wanted pedophile who fled the Seattle area in the late 70s after a warrant was put out for his arrest for molesting the neighbor’s 2 small daughters. My mom met him in 1986 when I was 4. My sister and I became isolated and cut off from society. We were sexually abused and severely beaten multiple times a day.
When I was 7 years old, we started dressing in long dresses and scarves. When I was 10 years old we were dressing like the Amish. My mom told everyone we were being homeschooled (in reality we just did sporadic math and reading lessons here and there in case anyone from the state wanted to see schoolwork.) When I was 11 we moved to a remote mountain ranch in northern WA. At 18 yrs old, I tried to escape and was taken to a real Amish community. Three and half years later I fled the Amish community after 6 months of sexual abuse by the bishop.
My entire church knew that the bishop was a sexual predator. They had shunned him for six weeks for molesting his daughter a few years before I landed in the community. I reported the bishop to the police because I was suspicious he was molesting the children. The police drug their feet and told me point blank that they had to be careful not to trample on the religious rights of the Amish community. The bishop ended up escaping to Canada with his whole family and went on to molest almost all of the 11 children. Eleven years later he was finally sent to prison after one of his daughters asked a neighbor for help. They had come back to the United States by that time.
Child Rights Act
I had approximately a third-grade education when I came out into the “world.” It’s so sad that stories like mine are allowed to happen, but my story is not the only one, In recent years I have received thousands of emails from people who grew up in strict religions/cults. We must call out this religious aspect of child abuse because no matter how many laws and regulations we put on the books if this issue is not addressed and children are not given rights, children in strict religions and cults will never be reached.
I am not anti-religion; I am a non-denominational Christian, but religion should not allow anyone to bypass child safety measures. If you agree please sign my Child Rights Act Petition and share it on social media. Religious Rights should not outweigh children’s Human Rights.
The Tennessee legislature has passed a law controlling the freedom of teachers and college professors to discuss racism. Quite literally, teachers are required to deliver content without expressing a point of view, for instance, acknowledging that slavery was wrong. The author of the bill says he is promoting freedom of expression by restricting freedom of expression.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—
“Divisive concept” rules are a set of laws passed last year that include many concepts usually taught in courses like sociology, psychology and political sciences.
The bill passed the House of Representatives on April 13, after passing Senate on April 5.
In 2022, lawmakers passed rules that allow state leaders to withhold funding for schools that teach about social, cultural and legal issues related to race and racism. Most of those concepts focus on how the impact of racism affects people today.
The law also specified that schools can teach about ethnic groups’ histories as described in textbooks and instructional materials. Educators can also only teach about controversial aspects of history, such as racial oppression or slavery, as long those discussions are impartial.
The bill, HB 1376, was introduced by Representative John Ragan (R – Oak Ridge). He previously said that the new bill was meant to strengthen the law passed in 2022 by “promoting freedom of expression,” and keep “colleges about advancing knowledge, not about advancing political or social agendas.”
Originally, the bill required institutions to publish a syllabus for each course offered in the semester on its website, meant to assess whether a “divisive concept” may be included in the curriculum. That requirement was removed in an amendment to the bill.
The bill restricts universities from using state funds for meetings or activities of an organization that “endorses or promotes a divisive concept.” It also requires employees who support diversity initiatives to “increase intellectual diversity” and support students through mentoring, career readiness and workforce development initiatives.
Employees would be exempt from the requirement if the new duties conflict with other laws, such as Title IX officers.
It also allows students and employees who believe that the school violated last year’s law a chance to file a report with the school. The school would then need to annually report violations to the comptroller of the treasury, redacting them as needed to stay in compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
The bill would also specifically require universities to allow any guest speaker on campus regardless of “non-violent political ideology” or “non-violent political party affiliation.”
The concepts that were banned from lessons in 2022’s law are listed below.
That one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex
That a person, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist or oppressive — whether consciously or subconsciously
That a person should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of their race or sex
That a person’s moral character is determined by their race or sex
That a person, by virtue of their race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex
That a person should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress because of their race or sex
That a meritocracy is inherently racist, sexist or designed by a particular race or sex to oppress members of another race or sex
That Tennessee or the U.S. is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist
Promoting or advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government
Promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people
Ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges or beliefs to a race or sex, or to a person because of their race or sex
That the rule of law does not exist but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups
That “all Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
That governments should deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the law
It also bans lessons that include “race or sex scapegoating” or “race or sex stereotyping,” as those terms are defined in law. In October 2022, a group of UT faculty called the law “chilling,” and questioned the law’s intent.
Rep. Justin Jones (D – Nashville) spoke about the bill when he returned to the House of Representatives after he was expelled and reinstated. He asked a series of questions, such as whether “college students are mature enough to talk about race and systemic racism, some of the concepts you want to prohibit being discussed at the college level?”
“I believe in God. All else is settled by facts and data,” Ragan said.
Jones again asked him to answer the question, but Ragan said he responded to the question.
“So, we’re playing ‘not-answer.’ Okay,” Jones said.
He also asked why the bill was introduced and said it seemed based on “white fragility and fears of the truth of history.”
“This bill was brought to me by a dean of college education, in addition to another university contributed to this bill. That was my motivation, too,” Ragan said.
He also said he did not want to name the person who brought the bill to him.
“How will we be honest about our history if you’re prohibiting any concepts about America’s racist history?” Jones said. “This sounds like fascism. This sounds like authoritarianism. This does not sound like democracy or freedom … This member has consistently invoked God to justify this unjust, immoral and extreme, racist law.”
Speaker Cameron Sexton (R – Crossville) stopped Jones from speaking. Rep. Justin Pearson (D – Memphis) also spoke after being reinstated to the House.
“This is a deeply concerning bill because it is continuing a pattern of practice that is harmful to all people,” he said. “When you try to control what a person thinks, then you are assuming the role of God rather than allowing freedom of thought.”
He said that the list of “divisive concepts” bars discussions on biases, white privilege and racism’s role in slavery.
The bill passed by a vote of 68-26 in the House.
During a meeting on March 13, Ragan said he received complaints from universities in the state about an “overemphasis” of the original law at the expense of “intellectual diversity,” which led to him proposing the new bill.
Representative Harold Love, Jr. (D – Nashville) previously asked if a conference focusing on Black history could still be held and promoted by a university should the bill pass. Ragan said it would be allowed as long as they “are not required to promote or endorse.”
Michael Barajas wrote a while back in The Texas Observer about an inhumane practice that is especially notorious in Texas prisons: long-term solitary confinement. He spoke with prisoners who had been in solitary for 22-24 hours a day for decades. They described losing their sense of reality, depression, thoughts of suicide.
He began:
Three years ago, guards came to Roger Uvalle’s cell to tell him he was “catching chain”—being shackled and transferred to another prison. As the guards escorted him to the chain bus with about 60 other inmates, Uvalle began trembling, overcome by anxiety. He turned so pale another prisoner told him he looked like a ghost. He didn’t relax until guards put him in his new solitary confinement cell, a 6-by-10-foot space where he’d spend 22 to 24 hours each day, alone, just as he had every day for the past two-plus decades.
Years of almost no human contact have warped Uvalle’s sense of time. Weeks, months, even years blend together. He says his memory has degraded to the point where he now struggles to keep track of the few personal items he’s allowed to have. He sometimes spends hours turning over his cell looking for stamps, letters, art supplies.
ROGER UVALLE. LAUREN CROW
His recollection of the time before 1992, when he went to prison for two armed robberies, is hazy. He knows he spent time in state hospitals; that his family struggled to find him mental health care growing up in San Antonio; and that as a teenager, he once tried to kill himself by swallowing a bottle of Valium. He knows that he was self-medicating on a cocktail of booze and whatever drugs he could find at the time. He knows that when he first went to prison, he was housed with the rest of the general inmate population and received mental health treatment, which he says helped.
And he knows that about 12 months into his 40-year sentence, guards sent him to solitary confinement after they accused him of being involved in back-to-back fights and hiding a makeshift knife in his cell. Two years later, while he was still in isolation, guards accused him of being affiliated with the Mexican Mafia prison gang, a scarlet letter officials use to justify keeping people in solitary.
About five years in, Uvalle says, he stopped getting medication for his mental illness, started hallucinating, and then struggled to keep himself and his cell clean. “I couldn’t care for myself and didn’t care about much and was experiencing psychotic behavior on a regular basis,” he wrote in a letter to me. When I visited him in prison recently, he talked about his most recent hunger strike, his third in the past two years. He had refused food for seven days before giving up this time. “Most of the time, they don’t acknowledge your hunger strike if you don’t have outside help,” Uvalle says. “They’ll let you die right there. They don’t care.” It reminds me of a line from one of the letters he sent me before our visit, when he described how some inmates set fires in protest. “There’s fires literally every day,” he wrote. “Never been in a place where there are fires every day.”
During our conversation, Uvalle seems shaken to be speaking with a stranger. His slow, soft speech hardly carries through the buzzy closed-circuit phone that connects us through the cracked plexiglass pane. He tells me he’s worried he’s getting worse. He’s struggling again to keep himself and his cell clean. He cries randomly sometimes, but doesn’t know why.
Uvalle went into solitary confinement in 1993, when he was 21 years old. Now, at 47, he’s been in solitary for 26 years—more than half his life…
Solitary confinement is a uniquely American form of punishment. It began as a misguided attempt at rehabilitation. America’s first prisons, built in the 1800s, housed inmates in near total isolation based on a Quaker belief that solitude fostered penitence and reformation—hence the word “penitentiary.” In reality, foreign attachés dispatched to study American prisons in 1831 were horrified after witnessing a degree of isolation “beyond the strength of man.” Charles Dickens was revolted by what he saw while touring an American penitentiary in 1842, writing, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” In 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a prisoner who challenged his placement in solitary for 45 days, stating that inmates subjected to even brief isolation tended to slip into a “semi-fatuous condition” or became violently and irreversibly insane.
By the turn of the century, solitary had mostly gone out of style as a core correctional model in America. But in Texas, as convict leasing and prison farms replaced slavery as the primary tool for black oppression after the Civil War, solitary was still reserved as a severe punishment. Inmates on Texas’ prison plantations were locked in pitch-dark boxes, sometimes for so long or in such great numbers that they suffocated to death. In 1947, Oscar Byron Ellis, who had operated a money-making penal farm in Tennessee, took over the Texas prison system and built a new “segregation unit” in Huntsville to quarantine “hopeless cases.” Under Ellis, the authoritarian control Texas exerted over its prisoners became the model other states tried to emulate. Penologists drooled over what they called the “Texas Control Model.”
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Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who writes on today’s issues with a critical lens. Here, she analyzes a very important election in Wisconsin that is key in reversing an unfairly gerrymandered state map and restoring abortion rights.
A key fight over democracy is currently taking place in Wisconsin. On April 4, voters in the state will choose a new judge for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. That judge will determine the seven-person court’s majority, a majority that will either uphold or possibly strike down the state’s gerrymandered voting maps that are so heavily weighted toward Republicans as to make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win control of the legislature.
Political scientists judge Wisconsin to be the most gerrymandered state in the country. The state is divided pretty evenly between Democrats and Republicans, although the Democrats have won 13 of the past 16 statewide elections. But despite the state’s relatively even political split, the current district maps are so heavily tilted for Republicans that Democrats have to win the statewide vote by 12 points just to get a majority in the assembly: 50 of the 99 seats. Republicans, though, can win a majority with just 44% of the vote.
The process of changing Wisconsin into a stronghold of Republican power began in the 2010 elections, when Republicans launched Operation REDMAP to take over state legislatures before the redistricting process based on the 2010 census began. That year, the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch pumped money into Wisconsin. Along with a strong talk radio media ecosystem, they helped to elect Governor Scott Walker to curb the power of public sector unions, which they blamed for what they considered excessive state spending.
The election of Governor Walker and a Republican legislature began the process of taking control of the state. Using granular voting data and sophisticated mapping software, the Republicans gerrymandered the state so severely that they retained control of the assembly going forward even though Democrats won significantly more votes.
As Ari Berman explained in Mother Jones, Republicans used that power to take away the bargaining rights of public sector unions in order to defund and demoralize one of the Democratic Party’s core constituencies. Berman quotes right-wing strategist Grover Norquist, who wrote that the Wisconsin policies were a national model. “If Act 10 is enacted in a dozen more states, the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics…. It’s that big a deal.” The assembly also passed at least 33 new laws during the Walker years to change election procedures and make it harder to vote.
When Democrat Tony Evers won election as governor in 2018, Democrats won all four statewide races. They also won 53% of the votes for state assembly—203,000 more votes than the Republicans did—but because of gerrymandering, the Democrats got just 36% of the seats in the legislature. The Republicans there immediately held a lame duck session and stripped powers from Evers and Democratic attorney general Josh Kaul. Then they passed new laws to restrict voting rights. The legislature went on to block Evers’s appointees and block his legislative priorities, like healthcare, schools, and roads.
Polls showed that voters opposed the lame duck session by a margin of almost 2 to 1, and by 2020, 82% of Wisconsin voters had passed referenda calling for fair district maps.
But when it came time to redistrict after the 2020 census, the Republican-dominated legislature carved up the state into an even more pro-Republican map than it had put into place before. Ultimately, the new maps gave Republicans 63 out of 99 seats in the assembly and 22 out of 23 in the state senate. They came within two assembly seats of having a supermajority that would enable them to override any vetoes by the governor, essentially nullifying him, although Evers had been reelected by 53.5% of the vote (a large margin for Wisconsin).
With gerrymandered districts virtually guaranteeing their reelection, Republicans are insulated from popular opinion. In the 2021–2022 session, they ignored the governor, refusing to confirm Evers’s appointees and going nearly 300 days without passing a single bill. They also ignored popular measures, refusing to let 98% of Democratic bills even be heard and refusing to address gun safety issues—although 81% of Wisconsinites wanted background checks for gun sales—or abortion rights, even though 83% of Wisconsin residents wanted at least some abortion rights protected after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last June put back into effect a law from 1849.
This radicalized Wisconsin assembly also mattered nationally when it became a centerpiece of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Nearly 75% of the Republicans in it worked to cast doubt on that election. After an audit turned up “absolutely no evidence of election fraud”—according to a Wisconsin judge—they tried to take control of elections away from a bipartisan commission and turn it over to the legislature they control. Senator Ron Johnson led the effort, calling for Republicans to take control of the elections because, he said, Democrats can’t be expected to “follow the rules.” In the 2022 election, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor, Tim Michels, promised, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.”
Their effort failed only because they fell two seats shy of the supermajority they needed.
By shaping the state maps and limiting the power of Democratic constituencies, Republicans have also taken control of the state supreme court, which sides with the Republican lawmakers’ attempts to cement their own power. Now voters have the chance to shift the makeup of that court. Doing so would make it possible that new challenges to the gerrymandered maps would succeed, returning fairness to the electoral system.
Wisconsin journalist Dan Shafer, who writes The Recombobulation Area, is following the race closely. His coverage reveals how the candidates’ framing of the election mirrors a larger debate about democracy. Theoretically, the election is nonpartisan, but Republicans paid former state supreme court justice Dan Kelly $120,000 to consult on Trump’s false elector scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and he was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee until last December. In 2012 he defended the Republicans’ gerrymandered maps in court.
For her part, Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz has made it clear she opposes the gerrymandered maps. “Let’s be clear here: The maps are rigged. Absolutely positively rigged,” she said in a candidates’ forum in January. “They do not reflect the people in the state. They do not reflect accurate representation, either in the State Assembly or the State Senate. They are rigged, period. I don’t think it would sell to any reasonable person that the maps are fair.”
Shafer notes that supreme court terms are for ten years, so if the court does not shift in this election, it, along with the gerrymandered maps, will remain in place “for the foreseeable future.” The race ultimately comes down to checks and balances, he says. The court has not checked the legislature, which has entrenched one-party rule in Wisconsin.
“This isn’t to say the maps should be redrawn to instead benefit Democrats,” Shafer continues. “Far from it. It’s about fairness. Some years Democrats will win a majority, other years Republicans will win a majority. If one party isn’t doing their job, voters should be able to do something about it. It’s about crafting a system that reflects the people of Wisconsin and can be responsive to the state’s voters. We don’t have that right now. And that has to be the goal.”
The Recombobulation Area is a six-time TEN-TIME Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication written and published by veteran Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. Learn more about it here…
The Recombobulation Area is a six-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication written and published by veteran Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. Learn more about it here…
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