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Documented: The Secret Plot to Destroy Public Education, Revealed

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2024 //
28

The Network for Public Education has worked recently with “Documented,” an organization that defends democracy. Its executive director Nick Surgey led a panel at our 10th conference in D.C. in October. Nick and his colleagues described their very well documented work to expose the plot to destroy public education. As I left the room, David Berliner said to me, “That was a terrifying hour.”

Here is the video. Please take the time to watch.

Nick is an expert on the extremist Alliance Defending Freedom, which has led attacks on public schools and on abortion rights. The Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was a lawyer for ADF.

Please read the Documented brief describing their work.

It will open your eyes to a well-funded plot to destroy our public schools.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: Do Not Be Fooled By These GOP Scams

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2023 //
113

Thom Hartmann explains the lies, hoaxes, And scams that Republicans use to deceive middle-income people to vote for them, against their self-interest. He shows how Jeb Bush tilted the election of 2000 in favor of his brother George.

This is a must-read.

Hartmann writes:

The GOP — to keep the support of “average” American voters while they work entirely for the benefit of giant corporations, the weapons and fossil fuel industries, and the morbidly rich — have run a whole series of scams on voters ever since the original Reagan grift of trickle-down economics.

Oddly, there’s nothing comparable on the Democratic side. No lies or BS to justify unjustifiable policies: Democrats just say up-front what they’re all about:

Healthcare and quality education for all. Treat all people and religions with respect and fairness. Trust women to make their own decisions. Raise the pay of working people and support unionization. Get assault weapons off the streets. Do something about climate change. Clean up toxic waste sites and outlaw pesticides that damage children. Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Nonetheless, the media persists in treating the two parties as if they were equally honest and equally interested in the needs of all Americans. In part, that’s because one of the GOP’s most effective scams — the “liberal media bias” scam — has been so successful ever since Lee Atwater invented it back in the early years of the Reagan Revolution.

For example, right now there’s a lot of huffing and puffing in the media about how the Supreme Court might rule in the case of Trump being thrown off the ballot in Colorado. They almost always mention “originalism” and “textualism” as if they’re honest, good-faith methods for interpreting the Constitution when, in fact, they’re cynical scams invented to justify unjustifiable rulings.

Thus, the question: how much longer will Americans (and the American media) continue to fall for the GOP’s scams? 

They include:

— Originalism: Robert Bork came up with this scam back in the 1980s when Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court and he couldn’t come up with honest or reasonable answers for his jurisprudential positions, particularly those justifying white supremacy. By saying that he could read the minds of the Founders and Framers of the Constitution, Bork gave himself and future generations of Republicans on the Court the fig leaf they needed.

The simple fact is that there was rarely a consensus among the Framers and among the politicians of the founding generation about pretty much anything. And to say that we should govern America by the standards of a white-men-only era before even the industrial revolution much less today’s modern medicine, communications, and understanding of economics is absurd on its face.

— Voter Fraud: This scam, used by white supremacists across the South in the years after the failure of Reconstruction to prevent Black people from voting, was reinvented in 1993, when Bill Clinton and Democrats in Congress succeeded in passing what’s today called the “Motor Voter” law that lets states automatically register people to vote when they renew their driver’s licenses. Republicans freaked out at the idea that more people might be voting, and claimed the new law would cause voter fraud (it didn’t).

By 1997, following Democratic victories in the 1996 election, it had become a major meme to justify purging voting rolls of Black and Hispanic people. Today it’s the justification for over 300 voter suppression laws passed in Red states in just in the past 2 years, all intended to make it harder for working class people, minorities, women, the elderly dependent on Social Security, and students (all Democratic constituencies) to vote.

The most recent iteration of it is Donald Trump‘s claim that the 2020 election, which he lost by fully 7 million votes, was stolen from him by voter fraud committed by Black people in major cities.

As a massive exposé in yesterday’s Washington Post titled “GOP Voter-Fraud Crackdown Overwhelmingly Targets Minorities, Democrats” points out, the simple reality is that voter fraud in the US is so rare as to be meaningless, and has never, ever, anywhere been documented to swing a single election. 

But Republicans have been using it as a very effective excuse to make it harder for Democratic voters to cast a ballot, and to excuse their purging almost 40,000,000 Americans off the voting rolls in the last five years.

Right To Work (For Less): back in the 1940s, Republicans came up with this scam. Over the veto of President Harry Truman, they pushed through what he referred to as “the vicious Taft-Hartley Act,” which lets states make it almost impossible for unions to survive. Virtually every Red state has now adopted “right to work,” which has left their working class people impoverished and, because it guts the political power of working people, their minimum wage unchanged.

— Bush v Gore: The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency. Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw around 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election and then, when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won, she invented a new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary; there is no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it. The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.

— Money is “Free Speech” and corporations are “persons”: This scam was invented entirely by Republicans on the Supreme Court, although billionaire GOP donors — infuriated by campaign contribution and dark money limits put into law in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals — had been funding legal efforts to get it before the Court for years.

In a decision that twists logic beyond rationality, the five Republicans on the Court — over the strong, emphatic objections of all the Democrats on the Court — ruled that our individual right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment also includes the “right to listen,” as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and they wrotein Citizens United:

“The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”

Without being able to hear from the most knowledgeable entities, they argued, Americans couldn’t be well-informed about the issues of the day.

And who was in the best position to inform us? As Lewis Powell himself wrote in the Bellottidecision, echoed in Citizens United, it’s those corporate “persons”:

“Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster…”

“Political speech is ‘indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.’ … The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual.”

They doubled down, arguing that corporations and billionaires should be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of money into the political campaigns of those politicians they want to own so long as they go into dark money operations instead of formal campaigns. What was called “bribery” for over 200 years is now “free speech”:

“For the reasons explained above, we [five Republicans on the Supreme Court] now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

— Cutting taxes raises revenue: As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman notes, the idea promoted by Reagan, Bush, and Trump to justify almost $30 trillion in cumulative tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations is “The Biggest Tax Scam in History.”

Reagan first pitched this to justify cutting the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% down to 25% in the 1980s, and it was reprised by both George W. Bush and Donald Trump for their own massive tax breaks for their well-off donors and peers.

The simple fact is that America went from a national debt of over 124% of GDP following World War II to a national debt of a mere $800 billion when Reagan came into office. We’d been paying down our debt steadily, and had enough money to build the interstate highway system, brand new schools and hospitals from coast to coast, and even to put men on the moon.

Since Reagan rolled out his tax scam, however, our national debt has gone from less than a trillion in 1980 to over 30 trillion today: we’re back, in terms of debt, to where we were during WWII when FDR raised the tippy-top bracket income tax rate to 90% to deal with the cost of the war. We should be back to that tax rate for the morbidly rich today, as well.

— Destroying unions helps workers: In their eagerness to help their corporate donors, Reagan rolled out a novel idea in 1981, arguing that instead of helping working people, corrupt “union bosses” were actually ripping them off.

Union leaders work on a salary and are elected by their members: the very idea that they, like CEOs who are compensated with stock options and performance bonuses and appointed by their boards, could somehow put their own interests first is ludicrous. Their only interest, if they want to retain their jobs, is to do what the workers want.

But Reagan was a hell of a salesman, and he was so successful with this pitch he cut union membership in America during his and his VP’s presidency by more than 50 percent.

— Corporations can provide better Medicare than the government: For a corporation to exist over the long term, particularly a publicly-traded corporation, it must produce a profit. That’s why when George W. Bush and friends invented the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 they allowed Advantage providers to make as much as 20 percent in pure profit.

Government overhead for real Medicare is around 2% — the cost of administration — and corporations could probably run their Advantage programs with a similar overhead, but they have to make that 20% profit nut, so they hire larger staffs to examine every single request to pay for procedures, surgeries, tests, imaging, and even doctors’ appointments. And reject, according to The New York Times, around 18% of them.

“Advantage plans also refused to pay legitimate claims, according to the report. About 18 percent of payments were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules, an estimated 1.5 million payments for all of 2019.”

When they deny you care, they make money. If they ran like real Medicare and paid every bill (except the fraudulent ones), they’d merely break even, and no company can do that. Nonetheless, Republicans continue to claim that “choice” in the marketplace is more important than fixing Medicare.

With the $140 billion that for-profit insurance companies overcharge us and steal from our government every year, if Medicare Advantage vanished there would be enough money left over to cut Medicare premiums to almost nothing and add dental, vision, and hearing. But don’t expect Republicans to ever go along with that: they take too much money from the insurance industry (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court).

— More guns means more safety: Remember the NRA’s old “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”? They’re still at it, and there’s hardly a single Republican in America who will step up and do anything about the gun violence crisis that is uniquely experienced by our nation.

Bullets are now the leading cause of death among children in the US, and we’re literally the only country in the entire world for which that is true. And a child living in Red state Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from a gun than a child in Blue state Massachusetts. But as long as the NRA owns them, Republicans will never do anything about it.

— The media has a liberal bias: This canard was started by Lee Atwater in an attempt to “work the refs” of the media, demanding that they stop pointing out the scams Republicans were engaging in (at the time it was trickle-down). The simple reality is that America’s media, from TV and radio networks to newspapers to websites, are overwhelmingly owned by billionaires and corporations with an openly conservative bent.

There are over 1500 rightwing radio stations (and 1000 religious broadcasters, who are increasingly political), three rightwing TV networks, and an army of tens of thousands of paid conservative activists turning out news releases and policy papers in every state, every day of the year. There are even well-funded social media operations.

There is nothing comparable on the left. Even MSNBC is owned by Comcast and so never touches issues of corporate governance, media bias (they fired Brian Stelter!), or the corruption of Congress by its big pharma and Medicare Advantage advertisers.

— Republicans are the party of faith: Republicans claim to be the pious ones, from Mike Johnson’s creepy “chastity ball” with his daughter, to their hate of queer people, to their embrace of multimillionaire TV and megachurch preachers. But Democrats, who are more accepting of people of all faiths and tend not to wear their religion on their sleeves, are the ones following Jesus’ teachings.

Jesus, arguably the founder of Christianity, was emphatic that you should never pray in public, do your good deeds in private as well, and that the only way to get to heaven is to feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, and love every other human as much as you love yourself.

Republicans, on the other hand, wave their piety like a bloody shirt, issue press releases about their private charities, and fight every effort to have our government feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, or even respect, much less love, people who look or live or pray differently from them.

— Crime is exploding and you’re safer living in an area Republicans control: In fact, crime of almost all sorts is at a low not seen since 1969. Only car thefts are up, and some of that appears to have to do with social media “how to” videos and a few very vulnerable makes of autos.

New FBI statistics find that violent crime nationwide is down 8 percent; in big cities it’s down nearly 15 percent, robbery and burglary are down 10 and 12 percent respectively. 

But what crime there is is overwhelmingly happening in Red states. Over the past 21 years, all types of crime in Red states are 23 percent higher than in Blue states: in 2020, murder rates were a mind-boggling 40 percent higher in states that voted for Trump than those Biden carried.

— Global warming is a hoax: Ever since fossil fuel billionaires and the fossil fuel industry started using the legal bribery rights five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court created for them, virtually every Republican politician in the nation is either directly on the take or benefits indirectly from the massive infrastructure created by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel barons. As a result, it’s almost impossible to find even one brave, truthful Republican who’s willing to do anything about the climate crisis that is most likely to crash not just the US but civilization itself.

— Hispanic immigrants are “murderers and rapists”: Donald Trump threw this out when he first announced his candidacy for president in 2015, saying, “They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In fact, Hispanic immigrants (legal or without documentation) are far less likely, per capita and by any other measure, to commit crime of any sort than white citizens.

— Helping people makes them lazy. The old Limbaugh joke about “kicking people when they’re down is the only way to get them up” reveals the mindset behind this Republican scam, which argues that when people get money or things they didn’t work for it actually injures them and society by making them lazy. The GOP has used this rationalization to oppose everything from unemployment insurance in the 1930s to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing supports today.

In fact, not only is there no evidence for it, but studies of Universal Basic Income (UBI), where people are given a few hundred dollars a month with no strings attached, finds that the vast majority use the extra funds to improve themselves. They upgrade their housing, look for better jobs, and go back to school.

If the morbidly rich people behind the GOP who promote this scam really believed it, they’d be arguing for a 100% estate tax, to prevent their own children from ending up “lazy.” Good luck finding any who are leaving their trust-fund kids destitute.

— Tobacco doesn’t cause cancer: Back in 2000, soon-to-be Indiana Governor and then-Congressman Mike Pence wrote a column that was published statewide saying, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” Pence’s family had made money off tobacco for years with a small chain of now-bankrupt convenience stores called “Tobacco Road,” but he was also being spiffed by the industry.

Similarly, George W. Bush pushed the “Healthy Forests Initiative” as president after big contributions from the timber industry: “healthy” meant “clear cut.” Bush also had his “Clear Skies Initiative” that let polluters dump more poison into our air. And the Trump administration, after big bucks and heavy lobbying from the chemical and Big Ag industries, refused to ban a very profitable pesticide used on human food crops that was found to definitely cause brain damage and cancer in children.

— For-profit utilities produce cheaper and more reliable electricity than government-owned and -run ones: This one goes back to the Reagan era, with Republicans arguing that the “free market” will always outperform government, including when it comes to generating and distributing electricity. In fact, each of us has only one wire coming into our homes or offices, so there is no possible competition to drive either improved performance or lower prices among for-profit utilities.

In fact, non-profit community-owned or government run utilities consistently produce more reliable electricity, serve their customers better, and charge lower prices. And the differences have become starker every year since, in 1992, President GHW Bush ended federal regulation of electric utilities. It’s why Texas, which has almost completely privatized its power grid, suffers some of the least reliable and most expensive electricity in the nation when severe weather hits.

— The electoral college protects our democracy: There was a time when both Democrats and Republicans wanted to get rid of the Electoral College; a constitutional amendment to do that failed in Congress by a single vote back in 1970. But after both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the White house by a half-million and three million votes respectively but ended up as president anyway, Republicans fell newly in love with the College and are fully planning to use it again in 2024 to seize power even if ten million more people vote for Biden this time (Biden won by 7 million votes in 2020).

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Republicans are now defending billionaires buying off Supreme Court justices and most recently Lever News found that they’ve been spiffing over 100 other federal judges — who regularly vote in favor of the interests of corporations and the morbidly rich — in addition to Alito, Thomas, Roberts, et al.

Republicans are also claiming that:

— Trump isn’t a threat to our democracy and his promises to be a dictator are “mere hyperbole.” 
— Letting Putin take Ukraine won’t put Taiwan and other democracies at risk.
— Ignoring churches routinely breaking the law by preaching politics while enjoying immunity from taxes is no big deal. 
— Massive consolidation to monopoly levels across virtually every industry in America since Reagan stopped enforcement of our anti-trust laws (causing Americans to pay an average of $5,000 a year more for everything from broadband to drugs than any other country in the world) is just the way business should be run.
— Teaching white children the racial history of America will make them feel bad, rather than feel less racist and more empathetic. 
— Queer people are groomers and pedophiles (the majority in these categories are actually straight white men).
— Banning and burning books is good for society and our kids.
— Ending public schools with statewide voucher programs will improve education (every credible study shows the opposite).

I could go on, but you get the point. When will America — and, particularly, American media — wake up to these scams and start calling them out for what they are?

I’m not holding my breath, although you could help get the ball rolling by sharing this admittedly incomplete list as far and wide as possible.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Bush, Jeb, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Fake, Florida, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans

Missouri: The Foundation that Wants to Replace Public Schools with “Christ-Centered K-12 Education”

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2023 //
9

This is a remarkable investigative article in the Missouri Independent by Annelise Hanshaw about the Herzog Foundation, which is spending its fortune on eliminating public schools and spreading “Christ-centered” schools.

Every state should have a journal like the Missouri Independent to sponsor independent investigative journalism.

The article contains some remarkable graphics about the linkages among rightwing groups, the foundation and the Republican Party. I won’t reproduce them, so please open the link and read the article and see the graphics. And read the story in full.

Hanshaw writes:

The headquarters of the Herzog Foundation sits on the edge of Smithville, in an 18,000-square-foot stone and glass building on a corner lot across the street from a cornfield on a gravel-lined highway.

Few Missourians have likely heard of the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation, or the organization’s namesake. But the unassuming locale masks what has been described as the “epicenter of the school-choice movement.”

Stan Herzog’s political largesse bankrolled a generation of conservative candidates and causes in Missouri, pouring through a constellation of political action committees and nonprofits. When he died in 2019, he set aside $300 million to start a foundation dedicated to expanding the reach of Christian education.

That mission kicked into overdrive in 2021, when Missouri lawmakers created a tax credit to support scholarships to help low-income students and those with disabilities attend private schools. Since then, a subsidiary of the Herzog Foundation has distributed almost half of the scholarships in the state.

And while the foundation thrives in Missouri, it also spreads its message nationwide.

It champions rallies across the country, holds workshops and bankrolls Christian-school-building packages. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke at the Herzog Foundation’s launch, and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a presentation at the foundation’s headquarters this February.

The foundation is barred from direct electoral activity because it is a charity, but businesses and political entities connected to Herzog continue pouring money into campaigns — spending more than $3.6 million on campaigns for state office since Herzog’s 2019 death , according to Missouri Ethics Commission filings.

It’s a recipe that gives the Herzog Foundation considerable stature in Missouri politics, as the push to expand Herzog’s education agenda continues to pick up steam.

“As far as education goes in Republican Party politics, they’re one of the major influencers in the state,” said Jean Evans, American Federation for Children’s Missouri state lead [Betsy DeVos’s organization].

“The Herzog family has been prolific donors to the Republican Party for a long time,” Evans added. “Stan Herzog passed away, but they’ve continued to support candidates and political causes. And now the Herzog Foundation is involved.”

But the foundation is not without its critics, who claim its real goal is the destruction of public education in Missouri and across the country.

“Herzog and other groups like Herzog have made it their goal to funnel money from taxpayers to private institutions,” said Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Clay County Democrat who is running for a seat in the Missouri Senate.

“We’re going to continue to see more legislation pushed by groups like Herzog to dismantle public schools as we know them,” she said…

Herzog laid the groundwork for the Herzog Foundation in 2016, but it didn’t launch until after his death, when he set aside nearly $325 million for his mission, giving entrusted parties 20 years to spend his endowment.

Leading the foundation is Todd Graves, a former U.S. attorney and chairman of the Missouri Republican Party whose brother is U.S. Rep. Sam Graves.

Kristen Blanchard Ansley is the secretary and treasurer. She is a former executive director of the Missouri Republican Party, and over the years has been involved in numerous PACs and nonprofits that poured Herzog’s money into state and local campaigns.

In December 2021, the leaders of the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation established another nonprofit called the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation. It was created specifically to distribute tax dollars set aside by Missourians under the new scholarship program created by lawmakers.

The program works by allowing Missourians — both individuals and businesses — to donate to educational assistance organizations in return for a tax credit equal to the donation, as long as it’s 50% or less of their tax burden.

When the General Assembly passed legislation in 2021 to create the program, the fiscal note indicated that the tax credits would take up to $75 million from the state’s general revenue annually.

Herzog Tomorrow Foundation’s application to participate in the program says its goal is to “catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education.”

It is allowed to take a percentage of the scholarship funds to cover administrative costs: 10% of the first $250,000, 8% of the next $500,000 and 3% of funds raised thereafter.

But the administrative fees don’t appear to be the motivating factor for becoming an educational assistance organization. According to Chris Vas, scholarship director at Herzog Tomorrow Foundation, the organization donated $800,000 back to the program “to ensure that every eligible student who applied for a scholarship received one….”

Of the 1,313 students with scholarships in the first year, Herzog Tomorrow Foundation handled 598 of them, according to the treasurer’s office.

Vas testified in a House committee hearing in March that the foundation raised $3.1 million from 165 donors.

He said 20% of scholarship recipients had an individualized education plan, an accommodation plan and set of goals for students with disabilities. An additional 60% qualified for free or reduced lunch, and the rest were from families with incomes below 200% the free or reduced lunch threshold.

The foundation partnered with 80 schools statewide, of which 65 had a religious affiliation.

Influence

In the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation’s 2020 tax filing, the organization’s attorney stated that the foundation did not “attempt to influence any national, state or local legislation” and did not “participate or intervene in any political campaign.”

Vas said in an email that the foundation also “does not play any role in the legislative process.”

But while the foundation is prohibited from interfering in politics, Herzog’s money has long helped bankroll a web of politically active nonprofits and political action committees — most of which are tied to the foundation’s current leadership team.

Graves, in addition to being partner of a law firm that represented former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, Tea Party Patriots and witnesses in the federal January 6 probe, serves on three committees led by Leonard Leo, a Federalist Society co-chair that former president Donald Trump enlisted to help choose conservative judges.

Many of the political nonprofits and PACs funded with Herzog’s money list Graves’ law firm as their address.

[Open the link and see the graphic here identifying the connections.]

Ansley is a board member of Cornerstone 1791, which also goes by “Liberty Alliance USA.” Vas serves as Cornerstone 1791’s executive director.

Cornerstone 1791 has spent a majority of its expenditures paying Robidoux Services LLC. In 2020, it spent nearly $250,000 for “management, operations and consulting services.”

Robidoux Services has no online presence. Graves is its registered agent, and its office is the Graves Garrett LLC office, according to the business’s paperwork. Vas did not respond to a question asking what Robidoux Services is.

Other expenditures include a $1,105 contribution to “Don’t Tread on MO PAC,” a political action committee with Vas as treasurer, and $1,075 to “Excelsior PAC,” which Vas became treasurer of two years later.

In October 2022, Excelsior PAC spent $15,000 on mailers opposing state Rep. Ashley Aune. Axiom Strategies created the mailing, designing an image of Aune riding a bicycle with U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“Radical liberal Ashley Aune wants to bring AOC-style politics to Jefferson City,” the postcard says.

Aune told The Independent her Platte County seat was eyed by Republicans as a district that could turn red.

“I was really surprised because it was just so far-fetched and kind of funny,” she said, recalling when she saw the postcard. “It’s not lost on me that A.O.C. and I are two Hispanic-identifying women, and we were being demonized.”

Ansley, Vas and Elliot also sit on the board of the Missouri Alliance for Freedom, a political nonprofit that has spent $770,000 since 2017, and American Democracy Alliance, a nonprofit that mostly donates to other nonprofits connected to Herzog.

Last year, a political action committee called “Let’s Go Brandon” poured money into the county executive race in Jefferson County to defeat former state Sen. Paul Wieland.

Wieland had drawn the ire of Graves when he vocally opposed his nomination for the University of Missouri Board of Curators a year earlier. And the money Let’s Go Brandon spent attacking Wieland came from an attorney who has long been close to Graves named Michael Ketchmark and Herzog Contracting Corporation.

Vas served as treasurer of Let’s Go Brandon while also working as the Herzog Foundation’s content director. He did not answer The Independent’s question asking why his PAC campaigned against Wieland.

He is also treasurer of Don’t Tread on Missouri PAC and Excelsior PAC.

Herzog companies have contributed $2.16 million to Missouri committees since 2017, when the state established campaign contribution limits….

[Open the link and see the graphic here to see Herzog’s contributions.]

At the end of 2021, the Herzog Foundation had nearly $364 million in assets, up $7.4 million from the previous year.

Although Stan Herzog gave 20 years to spend his endowment, investment income should sustain the foundation beyond that timeline.

With a resume of training events, awards, podcasts and speaker series — the foundation is likely expanding its programs.

The Herzog Tomorrow Foundation, the nonprofit that distributes Missourians’ tax dollars as an educational assistance organization, filed a business name with the secretary of state: “American Christian Education Alliance.”

In January, the nonprofit applied for two trademarks. The trademark registration is intended to cover “charitable fundraising” and “financial administration of education grant programs developed for students seeking a Christian education.”

Vas said ACE Alliance is a “project of the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation.”

“Its focus is to build a nationwide coalition of Christian education supporters,” he said.

Even before Missouri’s tax credit program was implemented, lawmakers were considering expanding it. While those efforts stalled, proponents are expected to try again when the legislature reconvenes in January.

“The MOScholars program has allowed low-income students and students with (individualized education plans) to attend the school of their dreams. We are extremely proud to participate in the program and help the next generation achieve the education that they deserve,” Vas said. “Our only hope is that we can help more kids in the future.”

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Missouri, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Josh Cowen: 2023 Was a Banner Year for Vouchers, Censorship, and Attacks on LGBT Kids

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2023 //
7

Writing in the Washington Spectator, veteran voucher researcher Josh Cowen reports that 2023 was a good year for some very bad ideas, many supported by prominent rightwingers and Dark Money, whose sources are hidden.

He finds it unsurprising that the voucher movement works closely with book banners and efforts to humiliate LGBT youth.

Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has studied vouchers since 2005.

He writes:

Over the past 12 months, the decades-long push to divert tax dollars toward religious education has reached new heights. As proclaimed by EdChoice—the advocacy group devoted to school vouchers—2023 has been the year these schemes reached “escape velocity.” In strictly legislative terms, seven states passed new voucher systems, and ten more expanded existing versions. Eleven states now run universal vouchers, which have no meaningful income or other restrictions.

But these numbers change quickly. As late as the last week of November, the Republican governor of Tennessee announced plans to create just such a universal voucher system.

To wit: successful new voucher and related legislation has come almost exclusively in states won by Donald Trump in 2020. And even that Right-ward bent required substantial investment—notably by heiress and former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Koch network—in state legislative campaigns to oust voucher opponents. Instructively, many of those opponents were often GOP legislators representing rural districts with few private schools to benefit.

As a scholar who has studied voucher systems—including through research funded by conservative organizations—I have been watching these developments with growing concern. It can all be difficult to make sense of, so let’s walk through it.

Vouchers Hurt Kids, Defund Public Schools and Prop-Up Church Budgets

First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.

And the voucher results reflect that educational vulnerability: in terms of academic impacts, vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores.

Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.

Vouchers do, however, benefit churches and church schools. Right-wing advocacy groups have been busy mobilizing Catholic school and other religious school parents to save their schools with new voucher funding. In new voucher states, conservatives are openly advocating for churches to startup taxpayer-funded schools. That’s why vouchers eventually become a key source of revenue for those churches, often replacing the need to rely on private donations. It’s also why many existing religious schools raise tuition almost immediately after vouchers pass.

The Right-Wing War on Public Schools

Victories for these voucher bills is nothing short of an ascendent Right-wing war on public education. And the link to religious nationalism energizes much of that attack.

Voucher bills have dovetailed almost perfectly with new victories for other priorities of the Religious Right. Alongside vouchers, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has also increased: 508 new bills in 2023 alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. As has a jump in legislation restricting book access in schools and libraries, with more than half of those bans targeting books on topics related to race and racism, or containing at least one LGBTQ+ character.

It is also important to note the longstanding antipathy that Betsy DeVos, the Koch Network, and other long-term voucher backers have toward organized labor—including and especially in this case, teachers’ unions. And that in two states that passed vouchers this year—Iowa and Arkansas—the governors also signed new rollbacks to child labor protections at almost the exact same time as well.

To close the 2022 judicial session, the Supreme Court issued its latest expansion of voucher jurisprudence in Carson v. Makin, holding that states with private school voucher programs may not exclude religious providers from applying tax dollars specifically to religious education. That ruling came just 72 hours before the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson removed reproductive rights from federal constitutional protections.

To hear backers of vouchers, book bans, and policies targeting transgender students in school bathrooms tell it, such efforts represent a new movement toward so-called “parents’ rights” or “education freedom,” as Betsy DeVos describes in her 2022 memoir. But in truth this latest push was a long time coming. DeVos is only one part of the vast network of Right-wing donors, activists, and organizations devoted to conservative political activism.

That network, called the Council for National Policy, includes representatives from the Heritage Foundation, the influential Right-wing policy outfit; multiple organizations funded by Charles Koch; the Leadership Institute, which trains young conservative activists; and a number of state policy advocacy groups funded by a conservative philanthropy called the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

It was the Bradley Foundation that seeded much of the legal work in the 1990s defending early voucher programs in state and federal courts. Bradley helped to fund the Institute for Justice, a legal group co-founded by a former Clarence Thomas staffer named Clint Bolick after a personal donation from Charles Koch. The lead trial attorney for that work was none other than Kenneth Starr, who was at the time also in the middle of his infamous pursuit of President Bill Clinton.

In late 2023, the Institute for Justice and the voucher-group EdChoice announced a new formal venture, but that partnership is just a spin on an older collaboration, with the Bradley Foundation as the tie that binds. EdChoice itself, when it was called the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, helped fund the data analysis cited by Institute lawyers at no less than the Supreme Court ahead of its first decision approving vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002).

From these vantage points, 2023 was a long time coming indeed.

And heading into 2024, the voucher push and its companion “parents’ rights” bills on schoolbooks and school bathrooms show no sign of weakening.

Prior to his political career, the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. That group, which itself has deep ties to Betsy DeVos’s family, has led the legal charge to rollback LBGTQ+ equality initiatives. It was also involved “from the beginning,” as its website crows, in the anti-abortion effort that culminated with Dobbs.

The Heritage Foundation has created a platform called Project 2025, which serves as something of a clearinghouse for what would be the legal framework and policy agenda for a second Trump Administration. Among the advisors and funders of Project 2025 are several organizations linked to Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and others with ties to the Council for National Policy. The Project’s education agenda includes dismantling the U.S. Department of Education—especially its oversight authority on anti-discrimination issues—and jumpstarting federal support for voucher programs.

A dark money group called The Concord Fund has launched an entity called Free to Learn, ostensibly organized around opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. In reality, these are active players in Republican campaign attacks around a variety of education-related culture war issues. The Concord Fund is closely tied to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief, Council of National Policy member, and architect of the Roe takedown. Through the Leo connection, the Concord Fund was also instrumental in confirming Donald Trump’s judicial nominations from Brett Kavanaugh on downward.

And so while the 2023 “parents’ rights” success has been largely a feature of red state legislatures, the 2022 Carson ruling and the nexus between Leonard Leo, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Institute for Justice itself underscore the importance of the federal judiciary to Right-wing education activism.

Long-term, the goal insofar as school privatization is concerned appears to be nothing short of a Supreme Court ruling that tax-subsidized school vouchers and homeschool options are mandatory in every state that uses public funding (as all do) to support education. The logic would be, as Betsy DeVos herself previewed before leaving office, that public spending on public schools without a religious option is a violation of Free Exercise protections.

Such a ruling, in other words, would complete the destruction of a wall between church and state when it comes to voucher jurisprudence. Earlier Court decisions have found that states may spend tax dollars on school vouchers but, as the Right’s ultimate goal, the Supreme Court would determine that states must.

Closer on the horizon, we can expect to see each of these Right-wing groups acting with new energy as the 2024 campaign season heats up. The president of the Heritage Foundation—himself yet another member of the Council for National Policy—has recently taken over the think tank’s political arm, called Heritage Action. At the start of the year, investigative reporting linked Heritage Action to earlier voter suppression initiatives, signaling potential tactics ahead.

And the money is going to flow—they have all said as much. After Heritage’s merger of its policy and political arms, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children followed suit by creating the AFC Victory Fund—a new group to spearhead its own campaign activity.

Their plan includes a $10 million base commitment to ramp up heading into 2024. “Coming off our best election cycle ever,” AFC’s announcement declared, “the tectonic plates have shifted decisively in favor of educational freedom, and we’re just getting started.” And, they warned:

“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school choice and freedom in education – you’re a target.”

In that threat lies the reality of the latest voucher push, and of this moment of so-called parents’ rights. None of this is a grassroots uprising. “Education freedom” is a top-down, big-money operation, tied to every other political priority of religious nationalism today.

But coming at the end of this past year’s legislative successes, AFC’s warnings are also a very clear statement of what is yet to come. The push to privatize American education is only just getting started.

Vouchers have turned into a campaign to subsidize the tuition of affluent parents while cutting the funding of public schools. This does not augur well for the health and future of our nation.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Catholic Schools, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Home Schooling, Ignorance, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: The Facts About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

The Network for Public Education reposted this excellent review of a book about vouchers. The review and the book summarize the findings about who benefits from vouchers and how they affect the public schools. The place to begin is with recognition of the handsomely funded propaganda campaign on behalf of vouchers. The promise was equity. The reality was inequity, diverting public funds to subsidize students who never attended public schools. Were vouchers intended as a scam or did they unexpectedly turn into one?

New post on Network for Public Education. Jan Resseger: New Book Contrasts What Voucher Proponents Promise to the Inequitable Results

Jan Resseger writes:

Jan Resseger looks at a new book edited by Kevin Weltner of the National Education Policy Center entitled The School Voucher Illusion. Reposted with permission.

Teachers College Press recently published The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, a dispositive analysis of the failure of publicly funded private school tuition voucher programs.

The book is a collection of essays edited by Kevin Welner, Director of the Education Policy Center and professor at the University of Colorado; Gary Orfield, Director of the Civil Rights Project and professor at UCLA; and Luis Huerta, professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Contributors include the editors as well as Derek Black, author of Schoolhouse Burning and professor at the University of South Carolina; Christopher Lubienski, author of The Public School Advantage and professor at Indiana University; Preston Green, professor at the University of Connecticut; and Suzanne Eckes and Julie Mead, professors at the University of Wisconsin, and many other scholars. The list includes academic experts on constitutional law, civil rights, public policy, and the social foundations of education.

In the final chapter, after 270 pages of data and theoretical exploration, Welner, Orfield, and Huerta contrast what the promoters of school privatization promise to the damage caused by the school voucher programs spreading across the states today: “If the real choice is not access to a superior, idealized school with an excellent faculty, but instead to a segregated religious school that is also struggling with concentrated poverty plus a weak and inexperienced teaching force, then vouchers are offering a fundamentally different experience than what’s been advertised.” (p. 276)

What about the diversion of states’ education budgets to private schools?

“What began in Cleveland and Milwaukee as small-scale pilots targeted to ‘save’ students of color from ‘failing public schools’… quickly transformed into a movement to give all students a taxpayer subsidy to incentivize them to leave their public schools and, then, into subsidies for students who were in private schools anyway—simply a transfer of money, usually to families without the financial exigency.” (p. 278)

Through the research reported by contributors to this book, the editors conclude that measuring the fiscal impact of transferring tax dollars to private schools is complicated due to all the ways: “vouchers interact with public budgets… Any measure of the immediate fiscal and educational efficiency of vouchers must… account for significant cost differentials compared to a comprehensive public school system… and must include measures of quality and the amount of services provided to all students. For example, public schools routinely enroll greater numbers of special education, vocational education, and English language learner students, who require more expensive educational services than those that private schools typically provide.” (p. 284)

There is also the problem of fixed costs that do not change when students leave public schools with a voucher: “A reduction in public school enrollments must also be taken into account due to effects on the economies of scale that support public school infrastructure…. When policies move students out of public school systems, the schools often have fixed costs… that cannot be lowered to match declining per-student aid from state governments, leaving less money for educational operations.” (p. 284)

And what about the vouchers taken up by students already in private schools? “Voucher programs only realize financial savings for state governments when the cost of providing vouchers to families is offset by corresponding reductions for students opting out of the public school system… Advocates who claim voucher and neovoucher programs are a savings to taxpayers use very high switcher rates, which can result in a gross overestimate of public-coffer savings.” (p. 284-285)

What have we lost through the erosion of the Constitutional protection of the separation of church and state?

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Although previous U.S. Supreme Courts used to interpret the separation of government and religion under the Establishment Clause, in three recent Supreme Court precedents, today’s justices have relied on the Free Exercise Clause—opining that if a state provides vouchers to private schools, it may not interfere with the free exercise of religion by denying vouchers to private schools that are run by faith communities, even those private schools that explicitly teach religion as part of the curriculum.

Welner, Orfield and Huerta explain how the Supreme Court’s new definition of church/state separation complicates voucher expansion across the states: “A state-established church is, after all, a formalized entanglement between the two institutions. Connected leadership and decision-making, finances and personnel, beliefs and positions…. Each of these is… a type of entanglement, in the sense that a move taken by one of the two institutions is directly felt by the other… We cannot yet know how far the current Supreme Court will take its elevated Free Exercise concerns about bias against religious institutions—perhaps all religiously motivated discrimination will be given heightened legal protection, or perhaps the Court will treat discriminatory practices as beyond the protection of the Free Exercise Clause, or perhaps racial discrimination will trigger greater scrutiny and protection than discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. It is not difficult to see the slippery slope of unregulated funding combined with extreme protection of religious freedom. While religious beliefs are often caring and comforting, some of these beliefs are hostile to outsiders…. (D)iscrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community is not unusual in private religious schools.” (pp. 280-283)

Are the most vulnerable children the ones who actually receive the vouchers? And what about protecting children’s civil rights?

“Advocates for expanding vouchers argue that students of color and low income students, particularly those with special needs, are otherwise denied the choices available to middle-class families. Vouchers, they say, will provide a large step toward equity of educational opportunity. Yet as described throughout this book, actual voucher policies tend to reach a different set of students. Choice research across the globe finds that unregulated choice creates stratification and disadvantages the disadvantaged.” (p. 286)

I wish the National Education Policy Center, of which Welner is the director, would publish, as a resource brief, the list of 13 questions (pp. 286-287) which advocates, critics, and regulators should ask when voucher programs are proposed. These questions are designed to expose a voucher program’s violations of standards of equity and opportunity. Here are just three examples: “Under what conditions are voucher-receiving schools allowed to reject applicants and expel students?” “Do the voucher-receiving schools have the staff and training to educate successfully and responsively with a community’s diverse population?” “Does the voucher program increase (or diminish) stratification by race and class? For students with special needs and students whose first language is other than English?” (pp. 286-287)

When students bring vouchers to private schools, there are myriad ways their rights are likely to remain unprotected: “State laws should mandate that, with the receipt of public funds, all participating schools become fully responsible to comply with all civil rights laws. For instance, they must agree to comply with the nondiscrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (or a substantially equivalent state civil rights act), including the antidiscrimination policies protecting students and all job discrimination components of staffing. They must also agree to comply with federal laws on special education rights and prohibitions against sex discrimination. Without such policies (which mirror those in many European countries that have voucher-like funding systems), taxpayer dollars are subsidizing open discrimination against some groups.” (p. 288)

The editors conclude The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity with a warning: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… If publicly stated social justice goals are to be anything more than empty and misleading rhetoric, lawmakers will need to address the concerns raised by the authors throughout this volume. Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (p. 290)You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/jan-resseger-new-book-contrasts-what-voucher-proponents-promise-to-the-inequitable-results/

Please open the link to read the post in full.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

A Useful Guide to the Privatization Movement: Please Add Your Nominees!

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2023 //
5

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science and an expert on dark money in education elections, prepared A CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION.

It is posted on the website of the Network for Public Education.

It is a glossary of the organizations and individuals who lead the effort to privatize education.

Please open the guide and see if you have names and groups to add. The GUIDE is meant to be built on the foundation created by Cunningham. Please send your suggestions. Are there groups active in your community that were not included? Send them to the Carol Burris at the Network for Public Education.

cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org.

Carol will forward your tips to Maurice Cunningham for review and possible inclusion.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, 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

Nikki Haley Talks About Schools in New Hampshire

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2023 //
24

We keep hoping that some sane Republican will emerge and eclipse The Former Guy. It’s probably a vain hope, but one likely prospect was Nikki Haley, former Governor of South Carolina and Trump’s Ambassador to the UN.

While campaigning in Londonderry, New Hampshire, Haley expressed her negative views about the nation’s public schools. Sadly, she parroted the standard Republican tropes.

She said:

“Stop the gender pronoun classes that are happening in the military,” Haley said, as the crowd cheered in response.

Mirroring the recent culture wars that have unfolded in local school districts like Goffstown, Haley called for “complete transparency in the classroom.”

“No parent should ever wonder what’s being said or taught to their children in the classroom,” Haley said.

Haley implored for the end of “national self-loathing” in schools. “Our kids need to know to love America,” Haley said, claiming that kids are being told America is a racist, rotten country.

“I was elected the first female minority governor in history,” Haley said. “America is not racist, we’re blessed.”

Categories Censorship, Curriculum, Extremism, Fake News, Gender, Lies, New Hampshire, Propaganda, Republicans

A Visit to Terezin, a Nazi Concentration Camp

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2023 //
49

While in Prague, I went with a group of about 25 people to visit Terezin. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had seen a book of drawings created by the children of Terezin. Years ago, I had visited Auschwitz, which was an extermination camp, with gas chambers and huge ovens for incinerating bodies. The displays of luggage, hair, and other reminders of those who were gassed were gruesome and horrifying.

Terezin was not an extermination camp, though thousands of people died there. Most people sent to Terezin were later shipped to Auschwitz to be killed. I recalled reading that the Nazis used it as a propaganda showplace, where they demonstrated to Red Cross officials that the Jews there were living in a place similar to a resort, under idyllic conditions.

Terezin is one hour outside Prague. There were two parts to it. First was an all-male prison where members of the Czech resistance were held, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others whom the Nazis hated. This facility was a centuries-old fort with high walls and abysmal living conditions. Many prisoners died of malnutrition or disease.

Then we went to the other part of Terezin, about a mile away. Also known as Terezinstadt, it is a picture-perfect town of colorful houses surrounding a park. The Nazis evicted all its inhabitants and used the town to house Jewish families from Czechoslovakia and Germany and eventually from other countries. There was no barbed wire, though every entrance into the town was guarded.

The town originally had 3,000-5,000 inhabitants. After it was turned into an internment camp for Jews, as many as 60,000 people were crammed into the same buildings. Nazis sent out flyers in Germany and Czechoslovakia portraying Terezin as an idyllic town. Wealthy Jews from Germany paid to go there and were allowed to bring a few pieces of luggage.

Once there, all their possessions were taken away, and they were assigned to a crowded dormitory. Men and women lived in separate dormitories, as did children. Families, of course, were separated. Adults were required to work, and children were mostly confined to their dormitories. Workers were paid in scrip, which they could use to buy clothing that had been confiscated from new arrivals.

Food was scarce, and many died of malnutrition and disease. There were regular transports from Terezin to Auschwitz. Somehow the Jews in Terezin knew that it was very bad to be shipped East, so the Nazis compelled some of those who arrived at Auschwitz to write their friends in Terezin to assure them that Auschwitz was a swell place.

In 1944, the King of Denmark asked the International Red Cross to inspect Terezin because Danish Jews had been sent there. The IRC let the Nazis know that there were coming, and the Nazis selected a date that gave them time to clean up the camp and stage a performance. The chiildren played soccer before an enthusiastic audience. A well-known Czech conductor led an orchestra of imprisoned musicians. The Red Cross issued a report praising conditions at the camp.

A few days after the Red Cross inspection, the orchestra conductor was deported to Auschwitz, along with many of the musicians.

The Terezin museum was fascinating, and I regretted that we had only an hour there. One room was filled with names of children who passed through Terezin. There were 15,000, but only 8,000 names. Names are added whenever anyone is identified. There was a wall of children’s drawings. And there were beautiful poems written by children who knew they were doomed.

The museum also contained a graphic chronology of anti-Semitism in Hitler’s time—such as the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leaders agreed on the necessity of a “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem: to kill every one of the 11 million Jews then living in Europe.

The architect of the Final Solution was Rudolph Heydrich, who was the deputy head of the Nazi “Protectorate” that included Czechoslovakia. He was assassinated by partisans in 1942.

In retaliation, the Nazis made an example of the towns of Lidice and Lezaky, believing the assassins came from there. The Nazis murdered every man in Lidice and sent the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where most died. Lezaky was totally destroyed, and its inhabitants killed.

In the midst of great beauty and art that we see today in Central Europe, it’s hard to imagine these horrific events. So much death and destruction. Unthinkable. Unimaginable. But true.

As I left the Terezin museum, I saw a copy of a diary written by one of the children who survived both Terezin and Auschwitz: Helga’s Diary. But the shop was closed. I was the last person to exit. I got on the bus and ordered a copy online.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, International, Propaganda

Texas: Abbott Calls Special Session to Force Vouchers

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2023 //
12

Governor Greg Abbott really, really wants vouchers. The State Senate agrees with him. The House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans but it thus far has refused to pass them. Rural Republicans in the House have allied with urban Democrats because both know that vouchers will harm their community public schools.

But Abbott is pulling out all the stops. He even refused to raise teachers’ salaries or increase public school funding until he gets a voucher bill.

The Texas Observer comments:

Governor Greg Abbott has called lawmakers back to a special legislative session starting this coming Monday, October 9. His message to them: Pass school vouchers—or else.

“There’s an easy way to get it done, and there’s a hard way,” Abbott said during a September 19 tele-town hall. “If we do not win in that first special session, we will have another special special session and we’ll come back again. And then if we don’t win that time … We will have everything teed up in a way where we will be giving voters in a primary a choice.”

From bullying legislators to “co-opting” churches and religious services, Abbott “wants to force a voucher at all costs,” said Patty Quinzi, legislative director of the Texas American Federation of Teachers. Pulling the purse strings of Abbott’s voucher campaign are a handful of billionaires who have invested millions to weaponize far-right culture war propaganda to fund what the governor has branded as “school choice” for parents.

Meanwhile, many public school districts started this school year with a budget deficit after the Senate refused to use the state’s $33 billion budget surplus to increase school funding without the condition of passing universal vouchers.

During the regular session, the House twice rejected proposals for vouchers or “an educational savings account,” citing constituent concerns that voucher programs would siphon money from public schools. When the Senate attempted to force the House to accept universal vouchers in return for passing its school funding proposal, its author, Representative Ken King, pulled the bill.

“In the end, the Senate would not negotiate at all. It was a universal ESA or nothing,” King wrote in his public statement. “I am committed to protecting the 5.5 million school kids in Texas from being used as political hostages. What the Governor and the Senate [have] done is inexcusable, and I stand ready to set it right and continue to work for the best outcome for our students and schools.”

In early August, the House’s 15-member committee on Educational Opportunity and Enrichment issued its interim report, signaling some members’ willingness to compromise on school vouchers if they were limited to students with special needs and if the money to fund a voucher program came out of the state general revenue instead of the Permanent School Fund. Earlier this year, the Observer revealedhow limited voucher programs in other states served as a trojan horse for larger, universal voucher programs, leaving public schools with large deficits and a loss of federal civil rights protections for parents who took their children out of public schools.

“We are $40 billion below the national average for school funding, so we have no business talking about any kind of program that takes more money out of our public schools,” said Representative Gina Hinojosa, who serves on the committee but declined to endorse its recommendations.

Greg Abbott has vowed to keep calling special sessions until the Legislature passes a voucher bill.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Propaganda, Rural Schools, Teachers
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