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Peter Greene: Vouchers Are NOT “Saving Poor Kids from Failing Schools”

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
7

A quarter-century after the launch of vouchers in Milwaukee, we now know a lot that we didn’t know then. The sales pitch was always humanitarian: vouchers, said its rightwing advocates, would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Except they didn’t. We now know, writes Peter Greene, that vouchers do not save poor kids from failing schools. They are a subsidy for students who were already in private and religious schools. Maybe that was their purpose all along.

One other thing we have learned about vouchers: the first voucher program is for low-income kids, but it is the camel’s nose under the tent. The income restrictions will be raised again and again, and more groups of eligible students will be eligible for vouchers. And one day, there will be vouchers for everyone, without regard to income or need.

He writes:

Voucher program after voucher program is launched with the same promise–this program will rescue disadvantaged students from public schools that can’t get the job done. But now that they’ve been around for a few years, we can see pretty clearly what they actually do.

They expand.

They subsidize private school costs for families that were already in private schools.

Arizona’s program is growing into a state budget buster. New Hampshire’s state subsidy for private school tuition is mushrooming in just three years, and roughly 90% of the students using vouchers are still students who were already in private school. Iowa’s program cost looks to be tremendous, with 19,000 students approved for vouchers.

Arkansas is joining the crowd, and provides a fine example of how these programs grow and who they actually benefit.

Arkansas’s voucher program was set up to start with disabled and low-income students. One immediate effect has been a boom in the Fake Your Way To Disability industry in Arkansas, where options to “prove” your eligibility include “a note from your doctor.” And the Arkansas Times has learned that many students qualifying for vouchers didn’t not even clear that low bar. It’s a bit of a Catch-22, as students often have difficulty getting admitted to a private school if they have an IEP, 504 plan, or disability. Still, almost half of Arkansas’s voucher students were approved based on some sort of claim of disability.

That may contribute to Arkansas’s numbers– of its voucher users, 95% did not attend a public school last year.

And the program is only slated to expand as the bars for qualifying are lowered even further.

Proponents of vouchers, like Governor Reynolds of Iowa, point at the expansion and huge cost runs as signs that families were “hungry for educational freedom.” Well, no. What it shows is that families like free money from the state to help pay for the expenses they have already freely chosen for their children.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Lies, Vouchers

BOMBSHELL: Cardona Gives Hillsdale Charter School $2 Million, Despite Lies and Lack of Diversity

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2023 //
29

What an embarrassment for the U.S. Department of Education!

Carol Burris writes on Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post blog, “The Answer Sheet,” that Secretary Miguel Cardona just awarded one of its largest grants ever to expand a Hillsdale College charter school in Ohio. Hillsdale is closely tied to the conservative Christian movement and to Republican leaders such as Donald Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee.

Hillsdale’s history program is called “the 1776 curriculum,” intended to refute the ideas of journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones’ controversial “1619 Project.” Hannah-Jones argued that American history began with the arrival of African slaves in 1619. To counter her narrative, the Trump administration in its waning days created “the 1776 Commission” to produce a quick version of a patriotic history. On President Biden’s first day in office, he abolished the 1776 Commission. Hillsdale College, however, continued the work of writing a full U.S. history curriculum based on the work of the 1776 Commission and made it available to schools that wanted history as it used to be taught: with great men, high ideals, and unblemished patriotism.

Hillsdale is now associated with a chain of charter schools that have adopted its Christian worldview and the 1776 curriculum. As Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education explains, a Hillsdale charter just won nearly $2 million from the federal Charter Schools Program. CSP is administered by the U.S. Department of Education. The charter made claims about its location and its demographics that are “misleading.”

Trying to think of an analogy to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona giving a large grant to a Hillsdale charter school: imagine Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos giving $2 million to a charter school for transgender children. Neither seems likely. But one scenario happened.

Valerie Strauss introduces Burris’s column.

A recent federal audit had a bit of bad news for the U.S. Education Department’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), which has provided more than $2.5 billion in grants to help open or expand charter schools. The audit by the department’s Office of Inspector General found that the CSP office may not have had “reliable information needed to make informed decisions” about continuing funding for charter schools with program grants.

There was more in the audit, which you can read about here, but this post looks at a different problem facing the CSP: schools with highly problematic applications that win millions of dollars of federal money anyway.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, some of them as for-profit entities, and they educate about 7 percent of U.S. schoolchildren. The 30-year-old charter sector has been riddled with financial and other scandals over the years, although supporters say that the problems these schools face are expected growing pains and that they offer families an important option to schools in publicly funded districts. Critics say that they are part of the movement to privatize public education and that some states have lax charter school laws that do not properly regulate them.

This post was written by Carol Burris, an award-winning former New York high school principal and now executive director of the advocacy group called Network for Public Education, which is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and seeks legislative reform of charter schools. Burris has written previously on the charter school program for Answer Sheet (for example, here and here). She has chronicled how the program spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened or closed not long after opening.

Burris writes about the funding application of a charter school in Ohio, the Cincinnati Classical Academy, and says that her organization, along with a group of Ohio legislators and other organizations, have asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to rescind the school’s nearly $2 million CSP grant. I asked the school to comment and will add its response if I get one. I asked the Education Department about the letter, and a spokesman said this in an email:

“The U.S. Department of Education (Department) is committed to supporting state and local efforts to increase school diversity and reduce racial and socio-economic isolation in schools, including through the Charter School Program (CSP). There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the integrity of CSP applications and funded grants. For example, all CSP applicants must provide attestations confirming the accuracy of information submitted in their application. False, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or claims may subject applicants to criminal, civil, or administrative penalties. Such safeguards are in place to help ensure charter schools serve communities well.”

By Carol Burris


An invitation to fiction writing. That is how Mike Winerip described the federal Charter School Program (CSP) grant process in a 2012 New York Times story, a characterization based on his investigation of a New Jersey charter school, which, despite three failed attempts to open and an application full of “misrepresentations,” had secured a CSP grant.

This issues didn’t go away. The All Football Club of Lancaster, Pa., an unauthorized charter school with no community support, submitted an often-incoherent application and yet won $1.2 million in 2020. A school run by a for-profit operator immersed in self-dealings and a segregation academy turned charter school cashed in on a North Carolina grant.

But the prize for the most inventive story to secure a CSP grant may belong to the Cincinnati Classical Academy (CCA), a Hillsdale College member school, for securing a nearly $2 million grant. CCA, which prides itself on teaching virtue, asked for the grant on the basis of its claim that it was closing the achievement gap and serving disadvantaged students, never reporting that only 16 percent of its students are economically disadvantaged and that 2 percent are Black — a starkly different student body from the overwhelmingly disadvantaged and majority-Black Cincinnati Public School students, who, CCA says, it wants to save from poverty.

Cincinnati Classical Academy


Cincinnati Classical Academy is located on a cul-de-sac in a leafy residential suburb of Cincinnati called Reading. The school’s website features a motto and a coat of arms, and plays a video showing the school building with a cross atop a tower at the entrance as well as a large American flag. It currently runs from kindergarten through seventh grade but says it plans to add a grade each year until it becomes a full K-12 school.

It takes considerable digging on its website to realize that CCA is a charter school, not a tuition-free Christian private academy. Its headmaster’s message speaks of morals, virtue and “old-fashioned” methods. Pictures of the gymnasium show a large crucifix on the wall next to an American flag. In a photograph of a school hallway lined with posters depicting the school’s virtues, Mary and the infant Jesus from Botticelli’s “Madonna of the Magnificat” illustrates the virtue of humility. To illustrate gratitude, CCA shows a family praying before a meal.

Nearly all of the uniformed children featured on the website are White. There is no mention of a provision for free lunch on the school’s webpage, which features catered lunches students can purchase in full or a la carte.

Although CCA is only in its second year, it has the status of being a member school of Hillsdale College’s K-12 initiative, which entitles it to free curriculum, training and consultation from the small, nondenominational, conservative Christian college in Michigan. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn is an ally of former president Donald Trump as well as of Trump’s former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and “distinguished fellow” Christopher Rufo, an activist who has fueled the culture wars.

Hillsdale provides support for CCA through its Barney Charter School Initiative, which began in 2010 with a half-million-dollar contribution from the Barney Family Foundation and which has opened a few dozen charter schools across the country. Hillsdale College’s mission is to maintain “by precept and example the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith,” while the mission of its K-12 charter schools includes a call for “moral virtue.” A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released in 2021 praises conservative values, criticizes liberal ones and distorts civil rights history.

According to its 990 tax forms, the Barney Family Foundation gives to health and child-centered charities along with Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Heartland Institute, the State Policy Network, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Heritage Foundation, and other right-wing foundations and think tanks.

Stephen Barney, a trustee emeritus on the Hillsdale College Board, has been one of its most generous donors. Between 2010 and 2019, the Network for Public Education identified more than $4 million earmarked for Hillsdale from Barney’s foundation, excluding unlisted donations in 2011 and or donations before or after those years.

Despite Hillsdale College’s frequent boasts of rejecting federal money (and the federal regulations that come with it, including Title IV provisions), the college’s affiliated charter schools eagerly dip into the federal Charter School Program through state entitlement grants. To date, the Network for Public Education has identified more than $16.75 million given to Hillsdale charters for school start-ups or expansions.
The grant to CCA is the first given directly by the federal department to a Hillsdale-connected charter school.

The questionable narrative

Applicants for Charter Schools Program Developer Grants fill out extensive applications in making the case for why their schools deserve the funds. According to the Federal Register, which calls for applications, the first purpose of the CSP is to “expand opportunities for all students, particularly for children with disabilities, English learners, and other traditionally underserved students, to attend charter schools.”

However, CCA caters to the well-served in disproportionately high numbers. State records show that it had no English language learners in 2022-2023 when it applied. Students with disabilities were enrolled at less than half the rate of the Cincinnati Public Schools. More than 80 percent of the students in Cincinnati Public Schools were economically disadvantaged compared to fewer than 17 percent at CCA. Other charter schools in Hamilton County had no problem attracting economically disadvantaged students; their average rate topped 85 percent.

The only category in which CCA exceeds a demographic of Cincinnati Public Schools is White students. More than 82 percent of CCA students are White, compared to 20 percent in the public school district.

So what can a school like this do to get a grant intended for schools that serve underserved kids? It didn’t reveal itself.

CCA cited Cincinnati Public Schools demographics to make its case in its application even though it is located in the Reading Community City School District, which is whiter, wealthier and has better ratings. Then it provided another handful of schools within five miles for comparison, none of which are in Cincinnati Public Schools. The school also talked in its application about closing the achievement gap and serving diverse, underserved students even though its unrevealed Black student population (2.4 percent) is so tiny the state does not even give it a gap-closing measure.

But where the school best revealed itself is in its list of goals and objectives. Not only did it fail to share its lack of diversity, it included no goals or objectives to address it. The application does not discuss the need to increase the number of English language learners, homeless children, students with disabilities, or students who get free or reduced-price lunches to level the enormous gap between the school’s proportions and the greater Cincinnati area.

If achieved, the goals in the application prepared by Kentucky’s Adkins and Company and signed off by the president of the school’s governing board will not disrupt the status quo. CCA will be able to meet them and keep the federal dollars flowing for four years while maintaining the reality projected on its website — that it is a magnet for White, Christian conservative families to escape the area’s diverse schools.

The CSP review process

If you have ever applied for a mortgage, you remember the extraordinarily detailed evidence you must provide to support every claim. That is not the case when “free government money” for charter schools is at stake.

The curious lack of a demographic profile of the school’s students was never a concern for the reviewers. CCA received the highest score of all applicants — 101. One of the three reviewers gave the school a perfect score. You can find the application and the reviewers’ scoring here.
Reviewers, who are solicited from the charter school world, were satisfied that “comprehensive data is provided, revealing the underperformance of Cincinnati public schools and underscoring the necessity for a high-quality alternative that offers families a viable choice,” even though the school is not a part of Cincinnati Public Schools.

The reviewers bought the same old narrative — a high-poverty district is bad, so bring in a charter school. They parroted back what the applicant said and praised Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Program.

Inexplicably, given the CSP’s checkered history, the Education Department increased the maximum amount of Developer Grants per charter school from $1.5 million to $2 million this year, and CCA got nearly every penny of the limit: a grant for $1,991,846. Grants are usually for five years, but CCA had been open for a year when it applied, so it got a four-year grant. The average amount per year is $300,000 but the Education Department gave CCA nearly half a million dollars a year — on the basis of claims that even cursory checks on state data or a visit to the school’s website would show to be untrue.

Back in Ohio, public education advocacy groups are outraged but not surprised. Bill Phillis, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, told me that the charter industry in his state “has been rife with financial and academic fraud and corruption.” He also said the CCA’s application for a development grant, with its “deception and disingenuous information,” is “typical of the charter industry in Ohio.”

The Network for Public Education sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona protesting the grant and asking that it be rescinded. It was signed by Phillis’s coalition, along with U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), five state legislators who represent the area, the Ohio PTA, both state teachers unions, the Cincinnati NAACP, and more than a dozen public education, civil rights, local teacher associations and advocacy groups.

Other 2023 CSP awardees are being challenged. The St. Louis Board of Education has passed a resolution protesting the more than $35 million CSP grant received by the billionaire-funded Opportunity Trust to open more charter schools in Missouri — nearly all of which will, because of state law, be located in St. Louis or Kansas City. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“The group misrepresented its relationship with SLPS in its application to the U.S. Department of Education, the resolution states. The school board “does not have a working relationship with the Opportunity Trust, does not collaborate with the Opportunity Trust and has opposed efforts by the Opportunity Trust to enact legislation to divert district funds to charter schools,” it [the resolution] reads.”

CSP grant applications that have been misleading and deceptive have still been rewarded with millions of taxpayer dollars from CSP. Whether the source of the problem is the department’s process, a less-than-rigorous application, the reviewer selection process or faulty regulations, awards that are based on disingenuous claims and deceit do not serve children or taxpayers well.

Until something changes, the statement that applicants sign — “I am aware that any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or claims may subject me to criminal, civil, or administrative penalties. (U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 1001)” — should be enforced, and the secretary should use his authority to terminate the grant.

Categories Accountability, Cardona, Miguel, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Equity, Extremism, Funding, History, Lies, Ohio, Race, Scandal, U.S. Department of Education

PR Firm Releases Statement from Moms for Liberty about Bridget and Christian Ziegler

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2023 //
27

By now, you have heard about the allegations of sexual misconduct by Christian Ziegler, leader of Florida’s state Republican Party, and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, school board member in Sarasota, and DeSantis appointee to the Disney World governing board. An unnamed woman accused Christian Ziegler of raping her. In her statement to the police, she referred to a prior three-way sexual tryst that included Bridget Ziegler. She canceled her date with Christian because he didn’t bring Bridget. Then she claims he showed up and raped her.

If you want to see the full police affidavit, read Mercedes Schneider’s account of the ménage a trois.

If you want to see Peter Greene’s wise take, read here.

Moms for Liberty released the following statement via a public relations person:

From: Grace English <Grace@cavalrystrategies.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2023 1:16 PM
Subject: Statement from Moms for Liberty Co-Founders re: Christian and Bridget Ziegler

 

Hello,

 

In response to numerous media inquiries about Christian and Bridget Ziegler, please see the following statement from Moms for Liberty Co-Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich:

 

Comment from Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice: 

 

“We have been truly shaken to read of the serious, criminal allegations against Christian Ziegler. We believe any allegation of sexual assault should be taken seriously and fully investigated.

“Bridget Ziegler resigned from her role as co-founder with Moms for Liberty within a month of our launch in January of 2021, nearly three years ago. She has remained an avid warrior for parental rights across the country.

“To our opponents who have spewed hateful vitriol over the last several days: We reject your attacks. We will continue to empower ALL parents to build relationships that ensure the survival of our nation and a thriving education system. We are laser-focused on fundamental parental rights, and that mission is and always will be bigger than any one person.” – Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice

 

— 

Grace English

Cavalry Strategies

(904) 923-1684

Categories DeSantis, Ethics, Florida, Lies, Scandal

Chris Tomlinson: Texas Oilmen Spreading Hate and Lies

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

Chris Tomlinson is an award-winning columnist for the Houston Chronicle. He uses his space to combat bigotry, stupidity, and lies. He is not a “both sides” kind of journalist.

He writes here about the infamous oil billionaires who use their money to spread their religious views, attack public schools, and encourage indoctrination.

He writes:

Texas oilman H.L. Hunt may have been the first to spend millions to promote right-wing media and extremist ideas, but he was far from the last.

Most Texans, let alone Americans, had never heard of Farris and Dan Wilks or Tim Dunn before this year. But journalists have revealed them as key supporters of some of the most controversial figures in Texas politics and bankrollers of political action committees staffed by Christian nationalists and antisemites.

The reclusive billionaires and their allies rarely respond to requests for comment from mainstream media and did not respond to my messages.

Farris Wilks, fracking billionaire and pastor of the Assembly of Yahweh (7th Day) Church, preaches that the Bible is “true and correct in every scientific and historical detail” and that abortion, homosexuality and drunkenness are serious crimes, according to the church’s doctrinal statement, the Reuters news agency reported.

Dan Wilks attends church with his brother, with whom he co-founded Frac Tech, a company they sold for $3.5 billion. They have since become some of the largest donors in Texas GOP politics, giving $15 million in 2016 to a political action committee backing Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Hunt, who broadcast his extremist commentary on radio stations nationwide, the Wilks brothers have also invested in media, supporting conservative mouthpieces like The Daily Wire and Prager University. Their PAC bought ads disguised as articles in the Metric Media news network, which includes 59 pseudo-local news sites in Texas, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.

The Wilks brothers have enjoyed their greatest success by joining Dunn to move the Republican Party of Texas as far right as possible through Empower Texans, one of the most influential dark-money political action committees.

Empower Texans shuttered in 2020 after spinning off operations into Texans for Fiscal Responsibility and Texas Scorecard, which rank politicians by their adherence to the group’s ideology. Dunn and the Wilks brothers have provided most of the financing and set the agenda for conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, who has led all three organizations.

In 2016, the groups opposed Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, whom they considered too moderate. They also ran ultra-conservative candidates against Republicans who ranked poorly on their scorecard. When Straus, who is Jewish, invited Dunn for a breakfast meeting, he reportedly said only Christians should have leadership positions, Texas Monthly reported in 2018. This is a sentiment he’d previously expressed in a 2016 Christian radio interview.

Republicans have long struggled with antisemitism. In 2010, State Republican Executive Chairman John Cooke wrote an email proclaiming, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it,” the Texas Observer reported.

Dunn and the Wilkses also finance special interest PACs. In 2017, Empower Texans supported and advised Texans for Vaccine Choice, an early anti-vaccination movement, former state Rep. Jonathan Stickland told the Washington Post.

Stickland left elected office to start Pale Horse Strategies, a political consulting firm that ran a new Dunn and Wilks PAC, Defend Texas Liberty. The PAC defended Attorney General Ken Paxton against corruption allegations and provided $3 million to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick weeks before he presided over Paxton’s impeachment trial, where he was acquitted.

Fresh from that victory, a Texas Tribune reporter observed Stickland, Republican Party of Texas chair Matt Rinaldi, prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Black Lives Matter shooter Kyle Rittenhouse enter the Pale Horse Strategies office in Fort Worth on Oct. 6.

Fuentes was driven to the meeting by Chris Russo, who used Dunn and Wilks money to found Texans For Strong Borders PAC. Russo has past ties to Fuentes, the Tribune reported.

When current GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan demanded Patrick give away the $3 million donation, Patrick said Dunn had called him to apologize.

Dunn “is certain that Mr. Stickland and all PAC personnel will not have any future contact with Mr. Fuentes,” Patrick explained.

Yet, when the Tribune’s Robert Downen kept digging, he found that Pale Horse’s social media manager, Elle Maulding, had called Fuentes the “greatest civil rights leader in history” and shared photos of them together. Shelby Griesinger, Defend Texas Liberty’s treasurer, has said Jews worship a false god and depicted them as the enemy on social media.

Dunn and the Wilks brothers have spent $100 million on ultra-conservative candidates, political action committees in Texas, and radical nonprofits. They finance a movement staffed by publicly antisemitic foot soldiers.

Conservatives considered H.L. Hunt a crackpot in his day. But this new generation has the GOP falling into a goose step.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ignorance, Lies, Religion, Stupid, Texas

Florida: Why a Librarian Quit

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2023 //
24

The Washington Post published this story of a librarian in Florida who “couldn’t take it anymore.” The book bans and censorship imposed by Governor Ron DeSantis and his compliant Legislature violated her professional ethics. Her job became impossible.

Governor DeSantis insists that no book is banned in his state. Maybe he should interview a school librarian.

Florida is the state where freedom to read goes to die.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the last one.

Inside were books. She didn’t know how many, or what they were, only that she would need to review each one by hand for age-appropriate material and sexual content as defined by Florida law, just as she’d been doing for months now with the 11,600 books on the shelves outside her door at Tohopekaliga High School.

Last box, and then after this week, she would no longer be a librarian at all.

She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida.

“What’s the name of this thing?” he said. “Freedom Week?”

She exhaled loudly. “Freedom Week.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “You know about this.”

Yes, Tania knew about it. It was one more thing the state had asked of them, a mandatory recitation of parts of the Declaration of Independence “to reaffirm the American ideals of individual liberty,” along with something else she had heard from the district. “They asked us to please not celebrate Banned Books Week,” Tania said.

She was tired. Her husband was always reminding her: Tania, you have no sense of self-preservation. She had thought about pushing back against the district, had imagined putting up posters all over the walls from the American Library Association celebrating “freedom to read,” a final act before her last day on Friday. But even if she did put up the posters, who would be there to see them once she left? The library would be closed after this week, until they found someone to take her place.

Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.”

That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students.

It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice.

And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.

A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.

On her desk was a purple folder containing the laws and regulations imposed on librarians by the Legislature.

Inside, there were printouts of 79 pages of Florida law and statute that told her how to think about what students should and should not read. One law made it easier for people to challenge books they believed contained sexual conduct or age-inappropriate material. Another defined that term, “sexual conduct,” in layer upon layer of clinical specificity.

When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too.

All of this took time. The librarian’s job was expanding even as she felt it was shrinking to a series of rote tasks: She would copy a book’s ISBN number into a peer-review database. She would decide whether to mark it with the thumb-size red sticker, provided to her by the district, that read “M” for “mature.” If a book wasn’t listed in a database, she would review it by hand, and then she would start again with the next book. In those hours, the job became a series of keystrokes, and she began to feel more like a censor than a librarian.

It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries.

This reign of terror has spread from Florida to other red states. Students can see whatever they want on their cell phones. But what they read must be scrutinized and censored, and librarians must abandon their professional ethics.

Categories DeSantis, Florida, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literacy, Literature

North Carolina: Traitor Tish Gets Her Reward

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2023 //
5

In North Carolina, Tricia Cotham won election as a Democrat in a Democratic district. She campaigned on a pledge to protect abortion rights and to oppose vouchers. Soon after winning election, Cotham flipped her party affiliation. Her flip gave Republicans a supermajority in both houses, meaning that Democratic Governor Roy Cooper could not veto anything passed by the far-right Republican General Assembly.

Thanks to Cotham, the Republicans tightened restrictions on abortion (to 12 weeks) and expanded the state voucher program.

Having betrayed the people who elected her, Cotham needed her district to be adjusted. Republicans complied, giving her a district with more Republicans.

The AP reported:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham, whose party switch earlier this year blindsided state Democrats and gave Republicans veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers, announced Saturday she will run for reelection.

Cotham’s announcement ends speculation over her political future after Republicans last month redrew maps for the state’s congressional and legislative districts that seemed to reward her with options if she chose to run for office in 2024.

The redrawn state House map places Cotham’s Mint Hill residence in a new district where Republicans appear to have a slight advantage, according to statewide election data. Had her district gone unchanged, she would have faced an extremely tough path for reelection.

It remains to be seen whether her new district likes double-dealers.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Lies, North Carolina, Politics

Peter Greene: The History the Christian Nationalists Want

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2023 //
28

Peter Greene writes here about the demand by Christian nationalists to rewrite history to their satisfaction. Whatever promotes the religion of their choice is good, whatever contradicts it must be left out. They want fairy-tale history.

Greene writes:

Recently Oklahoma’s education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters went on another tear, this time warning textbook publishers that they’d better not try to sell any wokified textbooks in Oklahoma.

“If you can’t teach math without talking about transgenderism, go to California, go to New York,” he told Fox News Digital. He even sent out a letter, just so they’d know. “Listen, we will be checking for these things now. Do not give us textbooks that have critical race theory in them.”

Walters said lots of things. Maybe he’s auditioning for a media spot. Maybe he wants to be governor. Maybe he’s just a tool. But he says all sorts of things like “In Oklahoma, our kids are going to know the basics. We want them to master it. We want them to do exceptionally well academically. We’re not here for any kind of Joe Biden’s socialist Marxist training ground.”

But somewhere in this conversation, Walters lays out a succinct summary of our nation’s history as he believes it should be taught.

“So as you go through, you talk about the times that America has led the free world, that we have continued to be that light. We’ve done more for individual liberty than any other country in the history of the world. And those belief systems that were there in place, it allowed us to do it. You’ve got to talk about our Judeo-Christian values. The founders were very clear that that was a crucial part of our success. Then you go through and you evaluate. Are these times we lived up to our core principles? You’ve got to be honest with kids about our history. So you talk about all of it, but you evaluate it through the prism of our founding principles. Is this a time we lived up to those principles?”

Most of the elements of the christianist nationalist version of US history are here. American exceptionalism– the light that led the free world, the very most ever done for individual liberty. A nation founded on Judeo-Christian values.

With that as a foundation, it’s safe to note some of the lapses, all of which are framed as an aberration, a lapse from our foundation and certainly not part of it (take that, you 1619 project-reading CRTers). In the CN view, every good thing that ever happened is because of our God-aligned nature, and every bad thing is in spite of it, quite possibly because Wrong People were allowed to get their hands on some power.

There are plenty of implications for this view of history. One of the biggest is that these folks simply don’t believe in democracy, because democracy allows too many of the Wrong People to get their hands on power. As Katherine Stewart puts it in her must-read The Power Worshippers—

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

Or, as she quotes Gary North, a radical free-market libertarian christianist who developed the Ron Paul Curriculum,

Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then we will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

The idea of individualism is also important in the CN view of US history. There’s no systemic anything–just the work of either good or bad, Right or Wrong individuals. And if everything is about the individual, then your problems are strictly your problems; your failures are all on you, not on society or community (the village has no responsibility to raise your child). That emphasis on the individual runs all through the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, both original flavor andthe Jordan Adams stealth version.

The rejection of systemic views of society and history matters. It goes along with the view that we pretty much fixed racism in the 1960s (even we got a little too socialist in the process). From which we can conclude that all attempts to talk racism now are just attempts to grab power with made-up grievances.

To take another angle– the underlying idea of the Classical Education that is so popular with the CN crowd is that there is One Objective Truth. Back in classical times, great thinkers understood this Truth, but the 20th century brought a bunch of relativistic thought and the evil notion that there are different, subjective truths. But our Founding Fathers knew the Truth and encoded it into the Constitution and our founding principles, and as long as we are led by people who follow that Truth, which is somehow both a Christian Truth and an American Truth, we are okay. People who don’t follow that Truth are a threat to the integrity and fiber of our country; consequently, they have to be stopped.

People who claim that history is complicated, that our founders were complicated, that humans are complicated–those people are just trying to confuse the issue, to draw others away from understanding The Truth.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Let me add that I don’t want to go back to 1776. The guys who wrote the founding documents were brilliant, but not on subjects like slavery and women’s rights.

Categories Curriculum, Extremism, History, Lies

Fact-Checking Trump’s Fantastical Memory of Clash with Iran

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2023 //
27

Glenn Kessler is the official Fact-Checker for The Washington Post. He scrupulously reviews the public statements of public officials and rates them according to their accuracy or inaccuracy. He is nonpartisan and judges Presidents of both parties. He awards “Pinocchios.” A small lie gets one Pinocchio. The highest level of lying gets four.

In this post, he reviews Trump’s claims about standing up to Iran.

Kessler begins:

We have a high bar for fact-checking statements by former president Donald Trump — any speech of his can contain dozens of falsehoods — but in a recent hour-long interview with Univision, the former president offered a tale of relations with Iran so startling that it begged to be explored.

In Trump’s telling, when he was president, the United States retaliated after Iran destroyed an American drone, and then when Iran decided to hit back, it purposely missed a military base with U.S. troops. Not only that, Iranian officials called Trump and let their plans be known, apparently out of respect for him.

You can read our full report and find out the Pinocchio rating by clicking this link (but you’ve probably already guessed the rating).

Could this really have happened? Of course not. We reviewed the public record on both incidents. In the first case, Trump canceled a planned strike on Iran after it downed a $150 million drone, to the shock of his aides. In the second case, most of Iran’s missiles struck a base housing U.S. personnel in Iraq. No one was killed, though many soldiers suffered serious brain injuries, but the absence of deaths was more a result of a well-planned evacuation than Iranian targeting. A vague warning without a target had been given to the Iraqi president — but not to Trump.

I clicked the link and this is what he wrote:

“You remember they [Iran] fired. They hit one of our drones and I hit them. …. They called us to tell us that we’re going to hit back. Here’s the target, but we’re not going to hit the target. We’re going to just miss it. It’s a military base.”

— Former president Donald Trump, in an interview with Univision, streamed Nov. 10

In his hour-long interview with Univision, the former president offered a tale of relations with Iran so startling that it begged to be explored. In his telling, the United States retaliated after Iran destroyed an American drone, and then when Iran decided to hit back, it purposely missed a U.S. military base. Not only that, Iranian officials called Trump and let their plans be known, apparently out of respect for him.

“It was quite an evening,” Trump recounted. “And they sent in 18 drones. Five of them self-destructed. The rest of them essentially missed the base. They were outside the base in areas where there weren’t [people]. Nobody was killed — with all of that, you know, being out there. But they called us. They call me and … this is Iran. This is,you know, this is Iran who’s supposed to be so hostile. They respected us. And I respect them.”

Were Trump and Iran’s supreme leader on speed dial with each other? Trump’s account “is complete nonsense,” said former Trump national security adviser John R. Bolton, who vividly recounted the first drone incident in his critical memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

Little else that Trump said is correct either. As Bolton put it in an interview, “It’s about five or six things mixed together and reported inaccurately.”

The Facts

As we learned during his presidency, Trump is not detailed-oriented and struggles to recount events with precision. He places himself at the center of action, a superhero president whom opponents respect or cower before, and the outcomes are always perfect. Whether he convinces himself the fake stories are true — or whether he deliberately tells falsehoods — is always open to question.

In this case, there was an Iranian attack on a U.S. drone in 2019 — but Trump did not hit back. He lost his nerve at the last minute, according to various news accounts. Then there was an Iranian attack on a U.S. military base in 2020. It involved missiles, not drones. No one was killed, though more than 100 service members suffered from traumatic brain injuries.

Let’s explore each incident in turn.

“They hit one of our drones and I hit them.”

On June 19, 2019, Iran shot down its second U.S. drone, a $150 million RQ-4A Global Hawk, in two weeks. The U.S. military said the drone had been operating in international airspace. Trump’s top national security advisers unanimously recommended that the United States answer back with attacks on three military facilities. According to Bolton’s book, Trump and his aides discussed possible casualties — he was told they would be small given the hour of the planned attack, though it might include Russians — and then Trump briefed congressional leaders about what was coming. He also tweeted: “Iran made a big mistake!”

Then, suddenly, Trump called off the attack with just minutes to go. In the undisciplined Trump White House, a legal adviser had wandered into the Oval Office and told the president that 150 people would be killed. It was not an official estimate but based on a guesstimate that 50 people worked at each base. (According to Bolton, the aide didn’t know the target list had shrunk to two bases.)

“Too many body bags,” Trump told Bolton in a phone call, telling him he had changed his mind, according to Bolton. “Not proportional.” After that, no one could convince Trump to stick to the original plan he had approved, even though he had worried that the attack was not robust enough. He repeatedly said he didn’t want to see a lot of body bags on television.

“In my government experience, this was the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do,” wrote Bolton, who also had worked for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Then to compound the internal angst about the turn of events, Trump tweeted about what he had done.

Open the link to see Trump’s tweet.

“On Monday they shot down an unmanned drone flying in International Waters,” he wrote. “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not … … proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

In an interview a few months later with Sean Hannity, Trump suggested that his restraint had generated goodwill with Iran. “We have a lot of goodwill built up,” he said. “They took down a drone, there was nobody in it. They took down a second drone, there was nobody in it. There’s a lot of goodwill.”

But just before that first drone strike, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had made his views about Trump known. Trumphad encouraged Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to meet with Khamenei to try to discover whether Iran was willing to enter new negotiations on the nuclear agreement that President Barack Obama had negotiated and that Trump had terminated. “I don’t consider Trump as a person deserving to exchange messages with; I have no response for him & will not answer him,” Khamenei tweeted.

“They called us to tell us that we’re going to hit back. Here’s the target, but we’re not going to hit the target. We’re going to just miss it.”

Given that Khamenei had said he wouldn’t even consider exchanging messages with Trump, it defies the belief that an Iranian official would call up Trump and inform him in advance that Iran was going to attack a U.S. military base and deliberately miss it.

Any Iranian attack that nearly struck a U.S. base would have made news. The only event that comes close to Trump’s description is a 2020 Iranian ballistic missile attack on al-Asad air base in northern Iraq, which came about six months after Trump scrubbed his planned attack.

The Islamic Republic fired ballistic missiles, with warheads weighing more than 1,000 pounds, at the base just days after Trump ordered the drone killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani on Jan. 3, 2020. Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, which is part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and conducts operations outside the country. U.S. officials claimed that he was actively developing plans for attacks on Americans.

Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said he received a post-midnight warning from Iran that its response to Soleimani was about to start. He was told Iran would target only locations where U.S. forces were present, but the message did not specify the locations, his spokesman said at the time.

Meanwhile, U.S. military intelligence had been watching Iran fill its missiles with liquid fuel and assumed the base would be a target. Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie Jr., commander of Central Command, waited until he believed Iran had downloaded the last of the commercial satellite photos, locking in the target, before he ordered about half of the 2,000 U.S. troops to evacuate the base, according to a detailed account by CBS News. The troops were divided by age — with the oldest ordered to remain to defend it.

The first missile hit at 1:34 a.m. on Jan. 8, less than 90 minutes after the message to Mahdi was received. The barrage lasted 80 minutes, with 11 of 16 missiles striking the base. Miraculously, no one was killed — and Iran later asserted to the United Nations that it was deliberate — but McKenzie estimated to CBS that had he not ordered the evacuation, 100 to 150 Americans would have been killed or wounded and 20 to 30 aircraft destroyed.

Trump initially bragged about the fact that no one was killed, but eventually it emerged that a U.S. contractor suffered a serious eye injury and 110 troops had traumatic brain injuries while sheltering in place, with 35 being sent to Germany and the United States for treatment. Trump dismissed the injuries as headaches: “But I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious. Not very serious.”

Asked to comment, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded, “I think you’re conflating a few different things here. President Trump’s recounting of what took place is true.” He did not respond to a request for documentation of Trump’s claims.

The Pinocchio Test

How many ways does Trump get this wrong? He claims that he hit Iran after a U.S. drone was downed, but in fact he canceled the strike, to the shock of his aides. He also asserts that Iran personally warned him they would attack a U.S. base and deliberately miss it. That’s ludicrous. In reality, a vague warning without a target was given to the Iraqi president — and most of the missiles hit the base. No one was killed, but that was more the result of a well-planned evacuation than Iranian targeting. Somehow Trump embraces Iran’s self-serving after-the-fact explanation to the United Nations. And while no one was killed, many soldiers suffered serious brain injuries.

Such a jumbled-up recollection of events is par for the course for Trump. So is the fact that he yet again earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

Categories Lies, Trump

Mothers Against Greg Abbott Celebrates Defeat of Voucher Bill!

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2023 //
2

Mothers Against Greg Abbott is celebrating because Governor Gregg Abbott’s voucher proposal—his highest priority—was defeated for the fifth time this year. Once, in the regular legislative session, then again and again and again and again in four special sessions.

Abbott offered bribes: more funding for public schools, a pay raise for teachers—but the bribes didn’t persuade the rural Republicans who saw vouchers as a threat to their small community public schools.

Abbott threatened to primary Republicans who didn’t vote for vouchers. That didn’t work either. Now the Moms (MAGA!) have to go back to work to get their public schools funded.

This is their message, issued within hours after vouchers went down for the fifth time:

From Mothers Against Greg Abbott:

The Texas House has just voted down school vouchers.

This is a huge victory for Texas public schools… and for mothers, and others, like us. Today’s victory  wouldn’t have been possible without the help you provided over the last several months. We asked you to help us support public schools, and you stepped up time and again.

Our hard work paid off. 

I don’t want to spike the football to celebrate our success. Not least because our public schools might not have a football to spike if the voucher plan had succeeded. (Yes, I know that spiking the football in a high school game is a 15-yard penalty, but let’s go with the metaphor...)

The same people who tried to strip our public schools of funding, and to give that money to rich private schools instead, aren’t going away. They will be back. 

And so will we: We defended our public schools today, and we will defend them again.

At Mothers Against Greg Abbott, we believe in high quality, free public education for our children. We support our public school teachers and our public school children. And we won’t let a handful of anti-school activists steal our children’s futures from us.

We’re here in support of public education, and we aren’t going anywhere. The next time public education is on the legislative table, we’ll be there to defend it. 

We won’t spike the football then either. We’ll celebrate because our public schools will still be there — to educate our children, to help them become our future leaders, to create the civic engagement that we all need.

And, yes, to give our kids a football, a softball, a volleyball, a tennis ball, a baseball, a basketball, arts programs, orchestra, school plays, reading specialists, school counselors, beloved school librarians, and so much more. 

With love for our public schools and our public school educators,

Nancy Thompson, Founder
Mothers Against Greg Abbott

This week, our Mothers For Democracy Institute shares the mic with YOU this week on the newest episode of The Voucher Scam! 

Hosts Claire O’Neal and Nichole Abshire ask listeners this week to share their love of public schools and their worries about vouchers. With today’s VICTORY on school vouchers in the Texas House, there is no better time to start streaming. Tune in to the conversation, here ›››

And, if you like what you hear, shoot over a donation and help support our podcast series.

Mothers for Democracy Institute is a 501(c)(3) and
donations are Tax Deductible. We just launched our podcast series The Voucher Scam, but we more planned for 2024 to further support democracy and civics education. And we
would love your support.
https://bit.ly/voucherscam

Mothers For Democracy / Mothers Against Greg Abbott is the largest coalition dedicated to defeating the extremist MAGA movement in Texas. While we don’t agree on every topic, we all agree the Texas GOP isn’t Texas values.

Since 2021, we’ve been helping lead the Democratic resistance in Texas, we’ve organized thousands of local voters and our public issue campaigns have reached millions of Texans in key battleground areas. Now, we’re backed by thousands of Texas parents who are mobilizing in their own neighborhoods to ensure the Texas we hand over to the next generation is better than the one we’ve inherited. 

We’re sick and tired of being linked to a handful of extremist MAGA spokesmen—divisive politicians like Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz. We know it’s going to take all of us to defeat them this election cycle. The power of mothers and others like us means we know we can do it: It’s time for democracy to prevail. 

100% of our work is powered by individual donations and our average donation is just $23. We can’t stop until our children have the future they deserve. So this election cycle, we’re taking down Ted Cruz and dozens more of his Texas MAGA cronies. With you by our side, we’ll deliver the kind of leadership everyone living in Texas can be proud of. 

Support Our Work

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Lies, Parents, Privatization, Republicans, Resistance, Rural Schools, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Valerie Strauss: Voters Give “Moms for Liberty” a Well-Deserved Whupping

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
4

Valerie Strauss reviews the local school board elections in several states, where the self-described “Moms for Liberty” were widely rejected. Despite their misleading name, most voters understood that they have an agenda to ban books, demonize teachers, and harass teachers and administrators with demands for censorship. Voters didn’t want more of the same.

Strauss writes:

In 2021, the right-wing “parents rights” Moms for Liberty claimed victory in 33 school board races in a single county in Pennsylvania — Bucks — saying that it had helped turn 8 of 13 school districts there with a majority of members who support their agenda.


Tuesday’s elections were a different story. In Bucks County, and many other districts across the country, voters rejected a majority of candidates aligned with the group’s agenda in what elections experts said could be a backlash to their priorities.
In Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey and other states, voters favored candidates who expressed interest in improving traditional public education systems over those who adopted the agenda of Moms for Liberty, which has been at the forefront of efforts to reject coronavirus pandemic health measures in schools, restrict certain books and curriculum and curb the rights of LGBTQ students, and other like-minded groups.

“‘Parental rights’ is an appealing term, but voters have caught on to the reality that it is fueling book bans, anti-LGBT efforts, pressure on teachers not to discuss race and gender, whitewashing history, and so on,” said political analyst Larry Sabato, a politics professor at the University of Virginia and founder and director of the Center for Politics. “Parents may want more input in the schools, but as a group they certainly aren’t as extreme as many in the Moms for Liberty.”


The school board results were part of a broader wave of support for moderate and liberal candidates in local and state elections who campaigned on support for traditional public education. An election analysis conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest national teachers’ union, found that in 250 races across the country, candidates in different types of races backed by opponents of traditional public education lost about 80 percent of the time.

I read the many comments that followed Strauss’s article, and to my delight, every comment agreed that Moms for Liberty was phony and its program was to undermine freedom of students to learn and freedom of teachers to teach.

Here are a few:

Moms for Liberty is an antisemitic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, white nationalist, vaccine-ignorant, book-banning, child-endangering hate group. The sooner it lands on the ash heap of Trumpist history, the better.

Moms for Liberty really means Moms for facism and hate.

They overplayed their hand. ‘Tis the demise of so many movements. Plus, oh yeah, they are loud, obnoxious, overbearing, power-hungry, wrong-headed, and anti-American.

Sorry Youngkin..looks like your dragging on public school teachers and setting up Nazi Snitch hotlines to turn them in didn’t turn out to be your key to the WH.

Well, it seems book bans, anti-LGTBQ+ agendas, revisionist history and free speech restrictions on teachers are NOT the wave of the future.

Sod off, Klanned Karenhood. We’ve got your number.

Sounds like voters are catching on to the Minivan Taliban. Not before time.

If you want to raise your own offspring to be ignorant bigots, have at it, ladies. Can’t guarantee they will appreciate you ensuring they will never be able to compete in the real world. Meanwhile, leave the rest of us alone.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Lies, Parents, Propaganda, Teachers
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