Archives for category: Injustice

Peter Greene: The True Purpose of Vouchers!

April 29, 2023 //

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?

Peter Greene sees a nefarious goal behind the voucher movement. He originally wrote this post two years ago, but recently reposted it because it was prescient.

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.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Propaganda, Vouchers

Misty Griffin: Religious Rights Should Not Outweigh Children’s Human Rights

By dianeravitch

April 28, 2023 //

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.

Misty Griffin

www.mistygriffin.com

mistyegriffin@gmail.com

Pasadena, CA

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Discipline, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Lies, Parents, Religion

Tennessee: Legislature Bans Honest Teaching About Racism

By dianeravitch

April 17, 2023 //

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.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Higher Education, Ignorance, Injustice, Propaganda, Racism, Tennessee

Texas: The Disgrace of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

By dianeravitch

April 12, 2023 //

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.”

Please open the link and read the rest of this horrifying article.

Categories Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Texas

Heather Cox Richardson: Tomorrow’s Vote Offers Chance to Curb Wisconsin GOP’s War on Democracy

By dianeravitch

April 3, 2023 //

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.”

—

Notes:

https://rpubs.com/jdjohn215/redistricting-plans-submitted-to-scowis

The Recombobulation Area

Wisconsin is the most gerrymandered state in the country. The race for Wisconsin Supreme Court could change that.

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…

12 days ago · 13 likes · Dan Shafer

https://www.wpr.org/daniel-kelly-jill-karofsky-emerge-state-supreme-court-primary

https://www.wpr.org/voting-begins-look-back-fight-over-wisconsins-voter-id-law

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/13/america-is-full-of-democracy-deserts-wisconsin-rivals-congo-on-some-metrics

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/dec/21/chris-larson/yes-majority-wisconsin-jurisdictions-support-nonpa/

It’s Time To Take Back Wisconsin for the Voters

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/wisconsin-supreme-court-primary-janet-protasiewicz

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/885096130/federal-court-in-wisconsin-upholds-voting-restrictions-favored-by-republicans

The Recombobulation Area

The race for Wisconsin Supreme Court kicks into gear at WisPolitics forum

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…

3 months ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Dan Shafer

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-wisconsin-lawsuits-elections-election-recounts-5b0fc57d521eb6e53ff1f78a695188b5

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-wisconsin-lawsuits-presidential-16d90c311d35d28b9b5a4024e6fb880c

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Categories Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Injustice, Unions, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Randi Weingarten: In Defense of Public Education

By dianeravitch

March 28, 2023 //

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, delivered the following remarks today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. She vigorously defended public schools against current efforts to destroy them. She named names. She explained the purpose of public schools, which makes them a precious part of our democratic aspirations but also a target for those who hate democracy.

Randi said:

Today, we once again grieve for families shattered by senseless gun violence. Please join me in a moment of silence for the lives lost at the Covenant School in Nashville, and for all victims of gun violence.

Today we renew our call for commonsense gun safety legislation including a ban on assault weapons. This is an epidemic that our great nation must solve.

There’s a saying: You don’t have to love everything about someone to love them. I’m sure my wife doesn’t love everything about me, but she loves me. (I, on the other hand, love everything about her.) Nothing is perfect. Banks aren’t. Congress isn’t. And neither are our public schools—not even our most well-resourced and highest-performing schools. Those of us involved in public schools work hard to strengthen them to be the best they can be. But only public schools have as their mission providing opportunity for all students. And by virtually any measure—conversations, polls, studies and elections—parents and the public overwhelmingly like public schools, value them, need them, support them—and countless Americans love them.

Public schools are more than physical structures. They are the manifestation of our civic values and ideals: The ideal that education is so important for individuals and for society that a free education must be available to all. That all young people should have opportunities to prepare for life, college, career and citizenship. That, in a pluralistic society such as the United States, people with different beliefs and backgrounds must learn to bridge differences. And that, as the founders believed, an educated citizenry is essential to protect our democracy from demagogues.

Thomas Jefferson argued general education was necessary to “enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “The real safeguard of democracy … is education.” And Martin Luther King Jr., in accepting the United Federation of Teachers’ John Dewey Award, made clear, “Education is the road to equality and citizenship.”

When kids go to school together, they become part of a community; their families become part of a community. That community comes together at school concerts, basketball games and science fairs, and for shelter and comfort, when people are displaced by natural disasters or, far too often, at vigils for victims of gun violence. In good times and bad, public schools are cornerstones of community, of our democracy, our economy and our nation.

But some people want that cornerstone to crumble—and they’re wielding the sledgehammers.

II. ATTACKS ON PUBLIC EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY

Attacks on public education are not new. The difference today is that the attacks are intended to destroy it. To make it a battlefield, a political cudgel. After former President Trump lost re-election, Steve Bannon, his key ally, declared that their fight goes through school boards. In a speech last year, culture war operative and Governor Ron DeSantis’ appointee Christopher Rufo put it bluntly, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” To this end, he says, his side has “to be ruthless and brutal.”

And, I would add, well-funded, which it is. The DeVos, Bradley, Koch, Uihlein and Walton family foundations and others have poured many millions of dollars into anti-public education, pro-privatization groups like the American Federation for Children and EdChoice.

The Betsy DeVos wing of the school privatization movement is methodically working its plan: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed. Criticize them for their shortcomings. Erode trust in public schools by stoking fear and division, including attempting to pit parents against teachers. Replace them with private, religious, online and home schools. All toward their end goal of destroying public education as we know it, atomizing and balkanizing education in America, bullying the most vulnerable among us and leaving the students with the greatest needs in public schools with the most meager resources.

It’s an extremist scheme by a very vocal minority of Americans.It’s hurting our efforts to do the work we need to do, which is educating the nearly 50 million kids who attend America’s public schools. And the urgent work of helping kids recover from learning loss, sadness, depression and other effects of the pandemic.

And it’s not what parents or the public want.

Let’s start with defunding: This year alone, 29 state legislatures are considering bills to either create or expand existing voucher programs. This is on top of the 72 voucher and tax credit programs in 33 states already subsidizing private and home schooling, costing billions every year. Voucher programs are proliferating even though research shows that, on average,vouchers negatively affect achievement—the declines are worse than pandemic learning loss. In fact, vouchers have caused “some of the largest academic drops ever measured in the research record.”

Proponents of vouchers used to argue that they were a way for low-income and minority families to transfer out of low-performing schools. No longer. Today most vouchers go to families who already send their kids to private schools. And private schools are not required to follow most federal civil rights laws protecting students, so they can—and many do—discriminate, especially against LGBTQ students and students with special needs.

The universal voucher program signed by Florida Gov. DeSantis yesterday will divert $4 billion from the state’s public schools. Florida ranks 44th in the nation in per pupil spending, and 48thin average teacher salaries. DeSantis is sending taxpayers’ dollars in the wrong direction.

And then there are the culture wars. What started as fights over pandemic-era safety measures has morphed into fearmongering: False claims that elementary and secondary schools are teaching critical race theory; disgusting, unfounded claims that teachers are grooming and indoctrinating students; and pronouncements that public schools push a “woke” agenda, even though they can’t or won’t define what they mean. Banning books and bullying vulnerable children. School board meetings descending into screaming matches. This is an organized and dangerous effort to undermine public schools.

Over the last three years, legislators in 45 states proposed hundreds of laws placing public schools at the center of culture wars: laws seeking to ban books from school libraries—even books about Ruby Bridges and Anne Frank and Roberto Clemente; laws restricting what teachers can teach and students can learn—particularly about about race, gender, LGBTQ issues, current events and American history; and laws attacking kids who are transgender. Students and staff should feel welcome, safe and respected in school—but the culture wars are fueling hostility and fear.

A torrent of enacted and proposed legislation targeting even the mention of “controversial” topics—sweeping and open-ended restrictions on what can be taught—has teachers teaching on eggshells. In Florida, the Department of Education has threatened teachers and librarians with felony prosecution if they provide students with books that the state later decides are inappropriate. If Florida lawmakers have their way, colleges will no longer have diversity, equity or inclusion policies; or tenure;or academic freedom. And AP courses and the mere utterance of LGBTQ will be banned in all K-12 schools. And forget about facts. Many laws and pending bills allow any individual to sue schools and teachers for perceived violations. The intent and effect are to create a climate of fear and intimidation.

This takes a toll on the quality of education teachers can provide our students, and on the trust and connection that are so important. Shouldn’t teachers be free to talk with students who are withdrawn or in distress, and to answer students’ questions? Don’t we want students to learn both our nation’s achievements that make us proud and the failings that make us strive to do better? Isn’t that our job?

Teachers should have the freedom to teach. And students should have the freedom to learn.

These same governors who are pushing vouchers and culture wars are also trying to defund and weaken teachers unions, so educators don’t have the wherewithal to fight back against censorship, attacks on their academic freedom, threats to their livelihoods and criminal prosecution.

These attacks aren’t about protecting kids. If they were, they would be working with us to address learning loss and the youth mental health crisis. They would be working with us to take on social media companies for contributing to that crisis.

If these attacks were about protecting kids, they would be working with us to fight against the leading cause of death for American children—gun violence.

If this were about protecting kids, instead of putting LGBTQ youth at risk and banning books about Black people and by Black authors, they would give a damn about these kids’ safety and well-being, including the youth suicide crisis.

Forty-five percent of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicidein the last year. And the suicide rate among Black youth of all sexual orientations has been increasing as well.

This is literally a matter of life and death. These attacks on public education make it increasingly difficult to create the welcoming, safe environment that our students need and deserve.

School climate and culture

It is a fraught time in our country. The effects of COVID-19; the climate of conflict; drug abuse; gun violence; economic insecurity; and the youth mental health crisis have all taken a heavy toll. Hate crimes have surged against many Americans—Asian, Black, Latino, Jewish and Muslim Americans.

School staff report a rise in bullying, verbal altercations and physical violence among students, as well as this behavior directed at them.

I recall a teacher saying that when her students are disruptive, it’s not because they are bad; it’s because they’re sad.

So many students have experienced isolation and trauma. They need help. But there weren’t enough mental health specialists before the pandemic, and they are in critically short supply now.

The persistent demonization and disrespect of teachers—from screaming matches at school board meetings to the former secretary of state saying teachers teach “filth”—have contributed to a culture of disrespect that seeps into our schools.

I just got a report from Florida. In Flagler County, a 17-year-old student with special needs pushed a paraprofessional so hard she went airborne and was knocked unconscious. A teacher in Osceola County was monitoring students in the hallway when a student sucker-punched him. And there are others. The educators who were hurt all cited lack of staff in the schools and lack of mental health support for students as the main reasons leading to the attacks.

And this crisis will only get worse as Gov. DeSantis’ universal voucher bill kicks in. What will the loss of $4 billion do to safety in Florida’s public schools? What will that do to the quality of academics, to the condition of school buildings, to teacher pay, to staffing shortages?

III. CRISIS IN THE TEACHING PROFESSION

Even before the pandemic, there were steep declines in teachers’ satisfaction. The percent of teachers who were “very satisfied” fell from 62 percent in 2008 to just 12 percent in 2022.

The stresses of the COVID-19 era—plus the culture wars, attacks on teachers, inadequate pay, poor teaching and learning conditions, and the threat of school shootings—have made recent years the toughest in modern times for educators.

Despite it all, teachers have thrown themselves into the mission of helping students recover academically, socially and emotionally. You heard Tamara (Simpson). I witness these acts of teaching, of nation-building, every day. Yet, according to our critics, we’re responsible for all the woes of society.

Even before the pandemic, nearly 300,000 teachers were leaving the profession each year. Now, it’s closer to 400,000.

And the teacher pipeline has collapsed as college students and career-changers choose not to go into education. How are we going to recruit and retain the staff schools need in this climate?

Our teaching profession is in crisis.

It’s in crisis because of the poor teaching and learning conditions created by inadequate funding for public schools. It’s teacher pay, which has been falling relative to other college graduates’ pay for the last 40 years. It’s giving teachers all the blame and little authority. And it’s the de-professionalization of teaching that demoralizes an already beleaguered profession.

I hear it all the time—teachers just want to teach.

IV.Strategies for Powerful Education

So where do we go from here?

The American Rescue Plan, and the programs it spawned, particularly the tutoring programs, have really helped. And we are grateful to President Joe Biden, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and the last Congress for the much-needed resources. Of course we will continue to fight this defunding of our public schools and this dividing of our communities. But we also must do better to address the learning loss and disconnection we are seeing in our young people. And we can. We can make every public school a school where parents want to send their kids, educators want to work and all students thrive.

Four strategies can help transform our schools to realize the promise and purpose of public education. Not just to overcome learning loss or get back to normal, but to truly help us prepare all children with the knowledge and skills they need for their lives, for college, for career and for citizenship. These strategiescan help us create safe and welcoming environments and bring joy back to learning. And in tandem, they have a catalytic effect. I have seen it work. But we need to do these strategies at scale—for every child and in every school. These four strategies are expanding community schools, scaling experiential learning, addressing staff shortages, and deepening the partnership between families and educators.

Community Schools

First and foremost, we need to make sure our kids are OK. That’s why we need community schools, which are hubs for neighborhoods, combining academics with extended learning opportunities, family and community events, and an infusion of medical, mental health and other social services. They are the best system I know to connect students and families to the support they need to learn, live and thrive.

A recent University of Calgary study found that youth suicide attempts increased 22 percent during the pandemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls seriously considered suicide in 2021—up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago. More than 42 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.

What helps? The Calgary report found that “school connectedness, defined as feeling close to people at school, has a long-lasting, protective impact for adolescents well into adulthood.”

Our schools must be equipped to support and connect with students, and there is no better model for this than community schools. There is another tragic reality in the United States: Half the students in America’s public schools live in poverty. Community schools mitigate the effects of poverty by providing essential services right where students are and where families can be.

Once kids’ physical and emotional needs are met, they are ready to learn, and teachers can focus on their primary role—which is to teach.

A few weeks ago I went back to Wolfe Street Academy, a community school in Baltimore, to see how they were doing.

Ninety-six percent of the students there qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch. Since converting to a community school nearly 20 years ago, Wolfe Street has gone from the 77th-most successful elementary school in Baltimore (out of 80) to the second-most successful. And, like other community schools,when COVID-19 hit it was a matter of ramping up services, not having to start from scratch.

Students have access to medical checkups, clothing and mental health services. Families have food assistance, language support and legal aid.

And this school is fun! Wolfe Street offers a wide variety of after-school programs, including chess club, robotics club, Mexican folkloric dance, orchestra, a soccer league and more.

And, by the way, Wolfe Street is a unionized public charter school.

There are successful community schools in rural and suburban areas, as well.

The Rome (New York) Teachers Association started a community school with help from the AFT in 2016. Today itsConnected Model has spread to 14 school districts and provides everything from access to mental health services and dental care, to food packages for weekends and holidays, and prom dresses!

A recent Rand Corp. study of community schools in New York City found positive impacts on both attendance and graduation rates. In New Mexico, community schools in operation for five or more years have better-than-average student achievement growth and higher attendance rates, and employed more highly effective teachers. And Robeson High School in Philadelphia went from nearly closing to a 95 percent graduation rate after implementing the community school model.

AFT members have helped create 700 community schools across the country, and we see how they meet kids’ needs. From Kimball Elementary School in Washington, D.C., to the Oyler School in Cincinnati, to Roybal-Allard Elementary in Los Angeles. That’s why the AFT is calling for 25,000 community schools by 2025 and our call is gaining steam. California just approved another $45 million to make 1 in every 3 schools in the state a community school. And President Biden’s budget doubles federal community school investment. We need to make this happen everywhere.

Experiential Learning

Second, we can re-engage students through experiential learning, transforming their educational experiences. Why do kids skip school, or slump in the back of the classroom? They may feel unsafe or unseen. Or just uninterested. We must do better. And we can.

Of course, fundamental academic subjects are important. But so is how we teach them. Experiential learning engages students through problem-solving, critical-thinking, teamwork, and learning by doing. We need to help kids engage with the world, with ideas and with each other—not just with their devices.

Experiential learning embeds the things that make kids want to be in school: The excitement of learning that is deeply engaging, and the joy of being together, especially after the isolation of the last few years. The camaraderie and responsibility of working together on a team.

And in the age of AI and chatGPT, this type of learning is critical to being able to think and write, solve problems, apply knowledge and discern fact from fiction.

Experiential learning can be applied to any content area from math to computer science to social studies, and often weaves subjects together in powerful interdisciplinary instruction. It can be adapted to any grade level. It can take place in rural, urban and suburban schools. And it nurtures kids’ natural curiosity and creativity. That is what robotics and debate teachers do all the time. It’s what I did as an AP government teacher at Clara Barton High School. These opportunities need to be the norm not the exception.

This type of learning makes clear just how outmoded the standardized test-based accountability system is. Of course, the country needs data on how our kids are doing, but if we are talking about student success, research shows classroom grades, not tests, are the best predictor of that. And experiential learning takes the classroom to a new level.

Experiential learning is assessed by teachers in their classrooms and focuses on mastery of the skill. It can include capstone projects that allow students to research a topic they’re passionate about and present it to their teachers and peers. It can include nature-based pre-K, where youngsters learn by exploring natural surroundings while building social skills with other kids. It can include students working together to code and build robotics projects; service-learning projects to support community members; and summer learning on a farm caring for crops or animals; or reporting for and producing a neighborhood newsletter. And it can start with field trips, during and after school.

Experiential learning has long been embedded in career and technical education programs where students use their minds and their hands to learn everything from auto repair, to nursing, IT, graphic design, welding and culinary skills. CTE students learn skills that give them a head start when they go to college or start their careers. Shouldn’t every student have that opportunity?

It’s also a proven strategy. Ninety-four percent of young people who concentrate in CTE graduate from high school, and 72 percent of them go on to college.

Talk to any employer about the skills and knowledge they look for in a successful employee, be it a plumber, a nurse or a lawyer, and you’re bound to hear similarities—employees who are creative, self-starters, critical-thinkers, problem-solvers;have empathy; and can build relationships. This type of learning provides every student with more options to develop those skills and to find their passion, their purpose and their pathway to good jobs and fulfilling careers.

Carpentry students use math when they’re figuring out the right cuts to make and how the pieces will all fit together. They’re using their hands and their minds to construct something. They’re acquiring literacy, technology and writing skills in developing business plans or a website. They’re building self-confidence and public speaking skills when they explain plans and work with customers or their peers. They have a sense of pride in the finished product. When a project doesn’t turn out as expected, they have to problem-solve what went wrong and try a new approach.

On Governors Island in New York City, students attending the Harbor School pursue industry certification in specialties like marine science and oceanography. In Louisiana, the Teaching and Reaching initiative is a two-year dual enrollment program that gives high school juniors and seniors the opportunity to earn credits and get a head start on pursuing a degree in education. In Peoria, Ill., CTE programs are preparing students for green energy jobs. And the Rio Rancho, N.M., public schools partner with the local college to provide stackable microcredentials in robotics, coding and automotive technology.

President Biden’s remaking of the economy through the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act will create millions of new high-paying jobs in renewable energy, broadband, semiconductors, construction, cybersecurity, transportation, small business, entrepreneurship and so much more. Then there’s healthcare and education, which have huge staffing crises right now. There are so many incredible opportunities for our young people in the job markets of today and tomorrow. They need to be ready to seize them. This dynamic new economic vision requires a dynamic new workforce vision.

We are all in, but this requires more than educators. And doing this at scale will require new approaches. We need to start by high school. We need employers to partner with us, giving students internships and apprenticeships, including paid opportunities so students who need to work can afford to participate. That’s why the AFT donated stipends for high school kids in Newark, N.J.’s Red Hawks Rising teacher pathway program. Teachers need experiential learning, too, and more externship opportunities in industry.

The potential for all of this is in our grasp, but we all need to do better on the alignment of people, preparation and professions. And it means all of us making changes. That is why we are working with the AFL-CIO, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, and the Bloomberg Philanthropies on this work. We are reaching out to business groups large and small, as experiential learning can take place in the private sector, the public sector and nonprofits. The formula of starting by high school and identifying school-to-career pathways, including community colleges, partnering with employers, and ensuring the opportunities are paid, can be replicated everywhere.

Revive and Restore the Teaching Profession

Third, for us to meet the needs of the 50 million children in our public schools, we need to revive and restore the teaching profession. That starts with addressing the teacher and school staff shortage crisis. And taking care of the educators we still have.

We know how to solve this. At our 2022 convention, AFT members unanimously approved the report our Teacher and School Staff Shortage Task Force had been working on for seven months. That report is a blueprint with scalable solutions that every district and state in the nation can implement. But it boils down to treating educators like the professionals they are, with appropriate pay and time to prepare for classes, the chance to collaborate with colleagues, the opportunity to participate in meaningful professional development, and the authority to make day-to-day classroom decisions. And ensuring they have the conditions that help students learn like buildings in good repair, with safe ventilation and smaller class size.

The Kansas City Federation of Teachers recently negotiated a new contract, and they used the AFT staffing shortage report as their blueprint. Now, every first- and second-year teacher will be mentored by an exemplary teacher, who will be paid for serving as a mentor. The union secured the highest starting teacher salaries in the region and increases to keep teachers in the profession. They won paid family leave for any parent, making them the first district in the state having this essential family benefit. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Thank you, Jason Roberts, the KCFT president, for being with us today.

I’m really worried about the well-being of teachers and school staff. We are working with groups like Educators Thriving on strategies that address well-being. Their program has helped teachers reduce emotional exhaustion, a leading indicator of burnout. And as a union, we are providing a trauma benefit to all our members and have worked hard to reduce student debt and make the bipartisan Public Service Loan Forgiveness program work. That’s been life-changing for those who qualify. But I am asking politicians to do their part as well.

A word to politicians—rather than using educators as cannon fodder, why not work with us? Like New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who enacted a $10,000 raise for teachers in that state. And Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who signed a bipartisan education budget that will make the highest state investment in Michigan history, investing in school infrastructure, teacher recruitment, school safety and mental health resources. And Sen. Bernie Sanders and Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, whose bills would raise teacher salaries. And New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who has introduced a bill to reduce federally mandated standardized tests.

Parents and Community as Partners

Fourth, the pandemic proved what we always knew: In-person learning is essential for kids, and public schools are centers of their communities.

It’s beyond obvious that the school-family connection, the parent-teacher connection, is vital to children’s success. But as others are trying to drive a wedge in that connection, we need to deepen it.

PTAs are remarkable organizations; so are so many parent groups and parent-teacher groups like Red Wine and Blue, Parents Together, MomsRising and the Campaign for Our Shared Future. And we are honored to work with them and others. But we know we need to create this muscle of working together everywhere.

That’s why the AFT created the Powerful Partnerships Institute, which supports family and community engagement. In our inaugural year, the institute has given out 27 grants to AFT locals across the country. Montana is engaging thousands of public education-supporting families and educators across the state. New Haven is working with educators, families and students on fair school funding. And you just heard a little about our partnership in Houston.

Let’s be role models for how we deal with conflicts and disagreement. During the pandemic, we met via Zoom with parent groups that often disagreed with us on COVID-19 safety measures and school closures. We heard each other out and talked things through. We need more of that in America.

Two years ago, the AFT increased our legal defense fund, so we could help if a member was put in jeopardy for teaching honest history or answering a student’s question. But in too many places, there are no unions, or educational associations, or parent groups. People feel alone and isolated. Teachers. Parents. Children.

That’s why, in conjunction with the Campaign for Our Shared Future, we are launching a new Freedom to Teach and Learn hotline for teachers, parents or students to use if they need support. It’s a place to call if you’ve been told to remove a book from the curriculum or from the library, or that there are topics that can’t be discussed in your classes, or that you cannot teach honestly and appropriately, or if politicians in your district or state are targeting vulnerable student groups to score political points. The Freedom to Teach and Learn hotline number is 888-873-7227.

These four strategies are worthy on their own. Together, they are transformative. Community schools will help young people not just recover from these punishing years and the scourge of poverty, but thrive. Experiential learning will prepare our youth with the knowledge and skills to seize the opportunities in our changing economy. To nurture and educate our young people, we need an educator workforce that is supported, respected and compensated befitting their vital role. And we need students’ circle of care—family, educators and community members—to be united in their support.

Conclusion

This is our agenda. But this can’t just be the work of our union or of school staff and schools alone. This is the work of a great nation—to ensure that our children’s basic human needs are met so they are ready to learn to their full potential. To exchange outmoded and test-driven ways of teaching and learning for effective and engaging approaches that excite students and prepare them to live their dreams and aspirations.

Our public schools shouldn’t be pawns for politicians’ ambitions. Or defunded and destroyed by ideologues.

We are at a crossroads: Fear and division, or hope and opportunity.

A great nation does not fear people being educated.

A great nation does not fear pluralism.

A great nation chooses freedom, democracy, equality and opportunity.

All of that starts in our public schools. We are that great nation, and we must act together—to defend, support and strengthen our public schools. And we must do that now.

Our children deserve no less.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Gender, Guns, Inequity, Injustice, Koch Brothers, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

Carol Burris: The Real Story Behind the State Takeover of the Houston Public Schools

By dianeravitch

March 28, 2023 //

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, recently joined parents, students, and teachers at a rally in Austin, Texas, to protest the state’s decision to take control of the Houston Independent School District. The district is no longer “independent,” since the state asserted its control. And Republicans showed that they don’t really believe in “local control,” any more than they believe in “parents rights.”

As a graduate of HISD, I feel especially outraged by the state takeover on flimsy grounds. Governor Abbott and Commissioner Mike Morath are playing politics. These kids are the future of Texas. Why are they being used as pawns?

Burris wrote the following explanation of the state takeover. It appeared on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog at the Washington Post website.

Strauss begins:

The administration of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced this month that the state was taking over the public school district in Houston even though the Texas Education Agency last year gave the district a “B” rating. The district, the eighth-largest in the country, has nearly 200,000 students, the overwhelming majority of them Black or Hispanic, and opposition to the move in the city, which votes Democratic, has been strong.

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said the takeover was necessary because of the poor performance of some schools in the district — even though most of the troubled schools have made significant progress recently.

Here is the real story of the takeover, written by Carol Burris, an award-winning former New York school principal who is executive director of the Network for Public Education. The nonprofit alliance of organizations advocates the improvement of public education and sees charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — as part of a movement to privatize public education.

By Carol Burris

Houston parents, teachers, and community leaders are protesting the decision by Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath to take over the Houston Independent School District. Some see the takeover as grounded in racism and retribution; others as big-government intrusion.

For Houston mom Kourtney Revels, the decision represents a hypocritical dismissal of parents by Gov. Greg Abbott (R). “How can Governor Abbott pretend to support parent empowerment and rights when he has just taken away the rights of over 200,000 parents in Houston ISD against their will and has not listened to our concerns or our voice?” she asked.

The takeover is the latest move in a long list of actions by Abbott’s administration to attack public school districts and expand privatized alternatives, including poorly regulated charter schools and now a proposed voucher program that would use public money for private and religious education. And critics see them all as connected.

State Rep. Ron Reynolds, a Houston Democrat, told the Houston Chronicle, that the takeover of the Houston district is part of Abbott’s attempt “to push” vouchers and charter schools, and to “promote and perpetuate the things that Governor Abbott believes and hears about, and that obviously isn’t diversity, equity and inclusion.”

The first takeover forum sponsored by the Texas Education Agency, which Morath leads, was described in the Houston Chronicle as “emotional and chaotic.” This week, the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice is leading a protest march before another TEA hearing. U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D), who represents the city, has asked the Biden administration to open a civil rights investigation into the takeover.

Background

The Houston Independent School District is Texas’s largest school district, with 284 schools and almost 200,000 students. It is also the eighth-largest district in the nation. Eight in 10 students come from economically disadvantaged families, and more than 1 in 3 students are not proficient in English. Fewer than 10 percent of the students are White.

The first attempted takeover of HISD by Morath was in 2019. The rationale for the takeover was school board misconduct and the seven negative ratings of Phillis Wheatley High School, one of the district’s 284 schools. Wheatley had been rated “academically acceptable” almost every other year until the YES Prep charter school opened nearby in 2011. During the 2021-2022 school year, Wheatley served 10 times as many Black students and more than twice as many students with disabilities as YES Prep, located just a five-minute drive away.

The district went to court to stop the takeover, and the debate wove through the courts until the Texas Supreme Court gave the green light for the takeover in January.

Almost four years have passed since the first takeover attempt, and the district has made impressive strides. The electorate replaced the 2019 school board, and a highly respected superintendent, Millard House, was appointed.

By every objective measure, the district is on a positive trajectory. The district is B-rated, and in less than two years, 40 of 50 Houston schools that had previously received a grade of D or F received a grade of C or better. Wheatley High School’s grade, the school that triggered that 2019 takeover attempt, moved from an F to a C, just two points from a B rating.

While there is a law that triggers a TEA response when a school repeatedly fails, the state Supreme Court did not mandate the takeover of the district. Under Texas law, Morath had two options — close the school or take over the district by appointing a new Board of Managers and a superintendent. He chose to strip local control. For those who have followed the decisions of Morath, his choice, the harsher of the two, comes as no surprise.

Mike Morath and charter schools

Mike Morath, a former software developer, was appointed education commissioner by Abbott in 2015. Morath had served a short stint on the Dallas school board, proposing that the public school district become a home-rule charter system, thus eliminating the school board and replacing it will a board appointed by then-Mayor Mike Rawlings, the former chief executive of Pizza Hut. Transformation into a charter system would also eliminate the rights and protections of Dallas teachers, making it easier to fire staff at will.

Morath and the mayor were supported in their quest to privatize the Dallas school system by a group ironically called Support Our Public Schools. While many of its donors remained anonymous, one did not — Houston billionaire John Arnold. Morath admitted encouraging the development of Support Our Public Schools and soliciting Arnold’s help in founding the organization.

Arnold, a former Enron executive and Houston resident, is a major donor and board member of the City Fund, a national nonprofit that believes in disruptive change and “nonprofit governing structures” for schools rather than traditional school boards. The City Fund touts New Orleans as the greatest school reform success. Arnold is joined on the board of the City Fund by billionaire and former Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who has blamed public school woes on elected school boards and said 90 percent of all students should be in charter schools.

The plot to turn the Dallas school system into a charter system fizzled by January 2015. In December of that year, Abbott plucked Morath from the school board to become Texas education commissioner based on his record as a “change-agent.”

As commissioner, Morath has unilaterally approved charter schools at what many consider to be an alarming rate. Patti Everitt is a Texas education policy consultant who closely follows the decisions of the Texas Education Agency. Everitt noted that Morath “has the sole authority to approve an unlimited number of new charter campuses in Texas — without general public notice, no community meeting, and no vote by any democratic entity.” According to Everitt, he has used this power more frequently than his predecessors. “Since Mike Morath became Commissioner, data from TEA shows that he has approved 75 percent of all requests from existing charter operators to open new campuses, a total of 547 new campuses across the state,” she said.

In 2021, according to Everitt, Morath approved 11 new campuses for International Leadership of Texas Charter Schools, even though 28 percent of the chain’s schools had received D or F grades in prior ratings.

Georgina Cecilia Pérez served two terms on the Texas State Board of Education, from 2017 to 2022. During that time, she observed the Texas Education Agency up close. A 2017 state law provides financial incentives for districts to partner with open-enrollment charter schools, institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations or government entities. She said that several charter partnerships with the Houston school district have been in the works waiting for the state takeover. She predicts Morath will approve them, “with no public vote.”

Abbott, Morath, and vouchers

Few were surprised this year when Abbott declared that establishing an Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program would be one of his highest priorities this legislative session. ESA vouchers, the most controversial of all voucher programs, provide substantial taxpayer dollars, through an account or via a debit card, to private school and home-school parents to spend on educational services. Eight states presently have ESA vouchers, with three new programs in Arkansas, Iowa and Utah approved to begin in coming academic years. Other legislatures in red states, notably New Hampshire and Florida, are pushing for ESA program expansion.

Abbott had been reluctant to embrace vouchers — possibly because of a lot of opposition in Texas, especially in rural areas — causing some to speculate that his newly expressed support for them is linked to presidential ambitions. School choice is a pet cause of one potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

Two voucher bills are now weaving their way through the Texas Senate. S.B. 8 would give families a voucher of $8,000 per child a year and institute a parents’ “bill of rights” that allows parents to review public school curriculums through parent portals. A second bill, S.B. 176, would give private school and home-school families a $10,000-per-child annual voucher. Although Abbott has not endorsed either bill, he has made it clear that he supports a universal voucher program, promoting universal vouchers in speeches at some of the state’s most expensive private Christian schools.

Last year, Morath gave tacit support for vouchers, claiming that “there is no evidence” that vouchers would reduce public school funding. In February 2023, however, when questioned during a state Senate hearing, the commissioner admitted that voucher programs could have a negative fiscal impact on public schools.

That same month, his second-in-command, Deputy Commissioner Steve Lecholop, encouraged an unhappy parent from the Joshua Independent School District to work with the governor’s speechwriter to promote vouchers, saying it would be a great way to “stick it to” the school district.

The lack of success of district takeovers

Regardless of Abbott’s and Morath’s ultimate objective — whether it be flipping some or all of Houston’s public schools to charters — research on state takeovers has consistently shown that state takeovers nearly always occur in majority-minority districts and rarely improve student achievement. Student results in takeover districts, with only a few exceptions, have remained the same or decreased. That was the conclusion of a comprehensive cross-state study published in 2021. The study’s authors, Beth Schueler of the University of Virginia and Joshua Bleiberg of Brown University found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.”

This intervention does not help students, and it mutes community voices, undermines democracy in Black and Hispanic communities, and pushes charter schools and other privatized alternatives to democratically governed schools.

An example is the takeover of Philadelphia’s public schools in 2001. Then-Gov. Tom Ridge (R) hired Edison Learning, a for-profit management company led by Chris Whittle, to study the district at the cost of $2 million. Edison Learning made a recommendation that it play a significant role in the reform and proposed running up to 70 schools. After community outrage, the number was reduced to 20. A few years later, the number of managed schools increased to 22. It was not long, however, before Edison Learning and the district were embroiled in a lawsuit concerning liability damages after a student was sexually assaulted in an Edison-operated school. By 2008, all for-profit management companies, including Edison, were gone. By 2017, the state takeover experiment ended.

Retired teacher Karel Kilimnik of Philadelphia had a first-row seat. She taught at a school taken over by the for-profit management company called Victory Co., which ran six schools under the School Reform Commission. The Reform Commission “promised academic and financial improvements that failed to materialize over their 16 years of control,” Kilimnik said. “Instead of improving the district, they opened the door to privatization and charter expansion and laid out the welcome mat for graduates of the uncertified Broad Superintendents Academy. They paved the way for the doomsday budget resulting in massive layoffs, larger class sizes, and the elimination of art and music.”

In his 2017 book, “Takeover,” New York University professor Domingo Morel concluded that, based on his extensive research, state takeovers are driven more by the desire of state actors to take political control away from Black and Hispanic communities than about school improvement. Recently in the Conversation, Morel described the seizure of the Houston school district as motivated by a need by the Republican establishment to thwart the growing empowerment of Black and Latinos as their numbers increase in Texas.

“The Houston public school system is not failing,” Morel said. “Rather, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Education Commissioner Mike Morath, and the Republican state legislature are manufacturing an education crisis to prevent people of color in Houston from exercising their citizenship rights and seizing political power.”

Allison Newport, a Houston mother of two Houston public school elementary students, agrees. “The commissioner should be congratulating Houston ISD and Wheatley High School for such incredible improvement in performance instead of punishing the students, parents, and teachers who worked so hard to make it happen.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Hoax, Houston, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Privatization, Racism, Republicans, Resistance, Texas

Glenn Sacks: Why the L.A. Strike Is Good for Workers and Students

By dianeravitch

March 25, 2023 //

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He is one of the UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles) representatives for his school and also a strike captain in both 2019 and 2023. I was pleased to join the 2019 strike and walk the picket line with UTLA. Wish I could have been in L.A. for this one too.

The public schools of Los Angeles were closed this past week by a three-day strike, led by the low-wage staff represented by SEIU 99—about 30,000 workers, including bus drivers, teacher aides, custodians, cafeteria workers, gardeners, and special education assistants. The UTLA struck in support of the SEIU; UTLA’s 35,000 members include teachers, counselors, therapists, nurses and librarians.

A tentative settlement was reached after Mayor Karen Bass intervened to mediate. The SEIU was seeking a 30% wage increase, and they won it. The agreement must be approved by the membership.

Glenn Sacks reported the unions’ victory directly to me:

Friday afternoon SEIU and LAUSD reached an agreement which addresses SEIU’s central demands. The agreement includes:

• a 30% wage increase

• Retroactive pay of $4000-$8000, depending on job classification, including a $1000 bonus for all
• Increase to average annual salary from $25,000 to $33,000
• 7 hours of work guaranteed for Special Education Assistants
• Fully paid health care benefits, including family coverage, for Teacher Assistants, Community Representatives, After School Program Workers and others)

The average pay for SEIU workers went from $15.00 an hour to $22.52 an hour.

As the UTLA often says: “When we fight, we win.”

Sacks wrote this article for FOX News. Good for him for getting published in a place usually dominated by anti-union views!

I don’t blame our bosses for being surprised.

For decades Los Angeles Unified School District’s workforce has been divided into eight different unions. Our contracts expire at different times and labor law often ties our hands, so LAUSD plays us off against each other, to the detriment of all employees.

Service Employees International Union Local 99 represents 30,000 LAUSD bus drivers, teaching assistants, maintenance workers and cafeteria staff. Recently SEIU announced a three-day “Unfair Practice Charge” strike based on its well-founded accusations that LAUSD’s mistreatment of SEIU workers violates California labor law.

LAUSD probably expected that with teachers coming in to work, along with personnel brought in from LAUSD headquarters on an emergency basis, they could roll right over SEIU, as school districts often do to campus workers in similar situations.

Except this week, Los Angeles teachers said “No.”

Over half of LAUSD’s SEIU workers have children in LAUSD. Many of our students have aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and older siblings who work at LAUSD.

There is only one way UTLA educators could keep faith with our students, their families and the workers whose labor enables us to educate our students — by honoring SEIU’s picket lines.

Our sympathy strike (aka “solidarity strike”) is very much in line with the traditions of American labor. American labor unions were built through labor solidarity, and in recent decades, unions have been undermined because union leaders have abjured sympathy strikes.

On this issue, recently one publication often critical of teachers unions unwittingly paid UTLA a complement:

“State law allows one bargaining unit to go on a sympathy strike with another union, but
Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s ‘highly unusual,’ for a teachers union to join a walkout with non-teaching employees.

“‘They may issue statements of support, but to join in strike is a different, and relatively rare, matter.’”

SEIU has historically been a much weaker union than UTLA. Their membership is divided into many different job classifications, they are often on campus at different times, and their heavily minority, immigrant and female membership is at a much lower socioeconomic level.

Despite this, SEIU’s performance this week was remarkably strong, reflecting the raw anger of its members over low wages and LAUSD abuses, which were well-documented by the national media this week.

UTLA has its own contract battle with LAUSD, but its robust showing this week also reflects our sympathy for our SEIU colleagues and the fact that UTLA has become a strong, disciplined labor union.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has found himself increasingly isolated, as many key players in Los Angeles education, including Austin Beutner, LAUSD superintendent from 2018 to 2021, school board Member Kelly Gonez, who served as president of the LAUSD Board of Education from 2020 until earlier this year, and LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg have all made statements undermining Carvalho in his battle against SEIU.

Earlier this week dozens of CA Legislators signed a letter backing SEIU, telling Carvalho to “resolve this.”

As in 2019, many of LAUSD’s own school administrators made it clear their hearts aren’t in this battle either, with some walking early morning picket lines with us or bringing us coffee and donuts.

Carvalho, humbled by the firestorm he foolishly ignited, has pivoted, shifting from stonewalling and even mocking SEIU workers towards a humble, “I feel your pain” posture.

Some of our critics claim our strike hurts our students, yet meeting SEIU demands will improve our schools.

To pick one example among many, each day special education students are deprived of two hours of their special education assistants’ time. Why?

LAUSD keeps these paraprofessionals at only six hours a day, so they won’t be considered full-time employees. This petty chiseling at the expense of our students typifies the way LAUSD mistreats its SEIU employees.

Other critics assert that parents have turned against teachers unions. These people are kidding themselves.

Polls show LAUSD parents support educators. A Loyola Marymount University poll taken earlier this year asked “LAUSD teachers requested an increase in salary. If labor negotiations cannot reach an agreement, would you support or oppose LAUSD teachers going on strike to meet their demands?”

Among those living within LAUSD’s boundaries, 76% supported teachers. Among those aged 18-29 — people who most likely attended LAUSD schools not long ago — 88% supported teachers.

Moreover, throughout this week of picket lines and massive rallies, the public showed they were behind us with continual honking horns, raised fists and shouts of approval.

As we walk to and from rallies in our union colors, we’ve had truck drivers and firefighters walk up to us, pat us on the back, and tell us, “Good luck.”

Leaving one rally a construction worker walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Give ’em hell!”

We did.

Categories California, Inequity, Injustice, Los Angeles, Students, Teachers, Unions

Tennessee: How to Make Critical Race Theory Relevant and Useful

By dianeravitch

March 24, 2023 //

I read this story with a sense of incredulity and impotence. Could this be happening in Tennessee in 2023?

A couple were driving through rural Tennessee on their way to a funeral in Chicago. They had with them in the car their children, one of who was breastfeeding. A police car pulled them over for a minor traffic violation. They had tinted windows and were driving in the left lane on the highway.

Instead of giving them a warning or a ticket, the couple was detained. Both were given drug tests, then hair follicle tests. The authorities decided they were unfit parents. Their children were taken away, including the breast-feeding baby.

A Black family from Georgia is fighting for the return of their five young children from the custody of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services after a traffic stop in Manchester, Tenn. last month.

Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams were on Interstate 24 heading to a family funeral in Chicago — kids asleep in the back of the car — when a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer pulled them over for “dark tint and traveling in the left lane while not actively passing,” according to Feb. 17 citations issued to the couple.

The trooper searched the family’s Dodge Durango then arrested Williams for possession of five grams of marijuana, a misdemeanor in Tennessee. Clayborne was cited but not arrested.

Clayborne said she was told she was free to leave with the children, but could follow a THP car to find her way to the Coffee County Justice Center in order to bond Williams out.

Six hours after the traffic stop, as Clayborne sat on a bench in the criminal justice center waiting for Williams’ release, the five children — a breast-feeding baby now four months old along with 2-, 3-, 5- and 7-year-olds — were forcibly removed from her side while an officer restrained her from reaching for her crying baby, she said….

Inside, “the process seemed slow,” Clayborne said. She waited on benches with her children until about 3 p.m. — nearly six hours after the 9:40 a.m. stop. It was then, according to court records, the children were taken from her.

Uniformed police officers approached Clayborne and her children and “circled me,” she said.

“Then my baby started crying so I reached for my son, and as I’m reaching, a man held me and told me, ‘don’t touch him. He’s getting taken away from you,’” Clayborne said.

One woman was walking her five year old son out the door; another picked her daughter and walked away. Someone else took the stroller with her baby inside.

“I just sat there crying, crying, crying,” she said, her voice shaking as she recounted the events via a Zoom meeting from Georgia.

Clayborne said no one asked her for any information – her phone number, the children’s health or nutritional needs and no one immediately provided her contact information so she could learn where they were or a court order showing why they were taken.

“My kids – they have asthma and you’re not asking about nothing,” she said. “I breastfeed.They didn’t give me anything. They just ran off with my kids.”

When the hearing concluded, the court decided to retain custody of the five children and ordered the parents to take additional drug tests, including hair follicle tests, which are not reliable but might show drug use months ago.

Your Critical Race Theory quiz: Please read the articles in full and respond to these questions:

If the couple were white, do you think the police would have acted differently? How? Why? Why not?

If the couple were white, would they have been subject to search to arrest and detainment? Why or why not?

If the couple were white, would they have lost custody of their children? Why and why not.

NOTICE: this post should not be read or shared in Florida, as it is illegal to discuss these questions.

Categories Bigotry, Injustice, Tennessee

Indiana: Teachers Oppose Bills to Divert More Public Funds to Private Schools and to Demonize Teachers and Librarians

By dianeravitch

March 21, 2023 //

Our reader Carolmalaysia received a letter from the Indiana State Teachers Association, protesting two bills to undercut public schools, teachers and librarians. She signed the petition.

1.] TAKE ACTION: Tell legislators to prioritize public schools and reject private school voucher expansion in radical state budget

All kids, no matter where they live, should be able to pursue their dreams in a great public school. However, the currently proposed radical budget increases spending on private school vouchers by 70%, while increasing traditional public school funding, where 90% of Hoosier students attend, by only 5%.

The current budget would provide more than $1 billion for wealthy families making up to $220,000 to attend private school for free, while neighborhood public schools continue to struggle to provide enough resources for students and pay hard-working educators a competitive salary.

Urge lawmakers to prioritize public education and oppose this huge expansion of unaccountable private school vouchers in the budget. Ask them to increase their commitment to public schools.

2.] TAKE ACTION: TELL LEGISLATORS TO OPPOSE A BILL THAT WOULD REMOVE LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS
02/17/2023

SB 12 is yet another culture war bill furthering a false narrative about our public schools. Rather than locally addressing issues over content, the bill would open teachers and librarians to criminal prosecution over educational materials. The bill would remove existing legal defenses schools and school libraries may use when locally determining educational materials. These matters will end up in litigation without administrative steps.

This bill has passed out of the Senate and is now under consideration by the House. Tell your representative to oppose SB 12.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Indiana, Inequity, Injustice, Librarians, Lies, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Teachers, Vouchers

Peter Greene: The True Purpose of Vouchers!

Misty Griffin: Religious Rights Should Not Outweigh Children’s Human Rights

Tennessee: Legislature Bans Honest Teaching About Racism

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Indiana: Teachers Oppose Bills to Divert More Public Funds to Private Schools and to Demonize Teachers and Librarians

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