Archives for category: Propaganda
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Darcie Cimarusti: Beware of the So-Called Parental Rights Groups

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
1

Darcie Cimarusti died a few days ago after a valiant fight against ovarian cancer. She was the communications director for the Network for Public Education and a treasured friend to all who worked with her. Having served many years on her local school board in Highland Park, New Jersey, she was passionately committed to supporting public schools against baseless attacks on the schools and their teachers.

Last December, despite her illness, Darcie wrote an article about hyper partisan groups like Moms for Liberty that were besieging local school boards with baseless complaints and driving wedges among parents.

Her article was printed in newspapers across the nation. This one appeared in the Bedford Gazette. She never stopped speaking up for what she believed in. Hers was the voice of reason, calm, common sense, and responsibility.

She wrote:

I have been a local school board member since my daughters, now 11th-graders, were in second grade. In that time, I have been involved in education policy discussions at the local, state and national levels on issues such as the rights of LGBTQ students, standardized testing and the privatization of public education.

The rise of the so-called “parental rights” movement in public education has been one of the thorniest, most perplexing issues I have encountered.

Parents certainly play a crucial role in the education of their children. Who would dare argue that they don’t? But heavily funded, right-leaning parents groups such as Moms for Liberty have unleashed a juggernaut of opposition to “critical race theory,” LGBTQ rights, social emotional learning, diversity equity and inclusion. So it has become imperative that we have an honest discussion about how much say parents should have in what is (or is not) taught in our public schools.

My district, unlike many, is racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, with 31 languages spoken in the homes of our students. Educating such a diverse student body presents many challenges and requires a nuanced approach to policy and practice to ensure all students have equal opportunities to learn, thrive and grow. While it is easy for school leaders to say they embrace diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s far too challenging to implement policies promoting those principles.

I have spent my time on the school board helping to develop systems that ensure decisions are made collaboratively and with as many voices involved as possible. This means making space not only for administrators, teachers, parents and students but also ensuring that historically marginalized groups are represented.

Decisions that affect students should never be based on the whims of the most privileged or powerful, and not on whose voice is loudest.

But the latter has become the hallmark of parental rights activists. They attend meeting after meeting, berating, shouting down and even making death threats against school board members. During the pandemic, battles over masks erupted at podiums at far too many school board meetings across the country and quickly morphed into demands to ban books, censor curriculum and muzzle “woke” teachers that parents accused of “grooming” their children.

In the 2022 midterm elections, parental rights activists were on the ballot in many states. With the support and endorsement of Moms for Liberty, they ran campaigns to become school board members in districts in red, blue and purple states. Moms for Liberty operates county chapters that aim to serve as watchdogs “over all 13,000 school districts.” Chapters empower parents to “defend their parental rights” and “identify, recruit and train liberty-minded parents to run for school boards.”

The “anti-woke” agenda espoused by Moms for Liberty and endorsed by school board candidates had the greatest successes in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis proudly declared the state was “where woke goes to die.” But in many other parts of the country, parental rights candidates lost their elections, with even conservative political operatives acknowledging that many of their campaigns were “too hyperbolic.”

Chaos has already erupted in several districts where they succeeded and won board majorities, with newly formed, inexperienced boards firing superintendents or forcing them to resign. One board voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory just hours after being sworn in.

After a decade of experience as a school board member, one thing I can say for sure is that the majority of parents, teachers and community members do not respond well to instability and disruption in their local public schools. When school boards run amok and rash decisions make headlines, communities work quickly to restore calm. If parental-rights school boards continue to govern recklessly, they will undoubtedly face a backlash from voters.

Creating and implementing sound school policies and practices that respect and affirm all students requires collaboration. It does not allow for the divisive, polarizing rhetoric and impetuous, rash decision-making that have become the calling cards of the so-called parental rights movement.

+1 

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

Florida Adopts Curriculum to Indoctrinate Students in Rightwing Views

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
46

Ana Cenallos of The Orlando Sentinel reports that the state of Florida adopted curriculum materials created by rightwing talk show host Dennis Prager with the explicit purpose of indoctrinating students to accept rightwing views of controversial topics.

Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly says he opposes indoctrination in schools. Yet his administration in early July approved materials from a conservative group that says it’s all about indoctrination and “changing minds.”

The Florida Department of Education determined that educational materials geared toward young children and high school students created by PragerU, a nonprofit co-founded by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, were in alignment with the state’s standards on how to teach civics and government to K-12 students.

The content, some of which is narrated by conservative personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens, features cartoons, five-minute video history lessons and story-time shows for young children. It is part of a brand called PragerU Kids. And the lessons share a common message: Being pro-American means aligning oneself to mainstream conservative talking points.

“We are in the mind-changing business and few groups can say that,” Prager says in a promotional video for PragerU. He reiterated this sentiment this summer at a conference for the conservative group Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia, saying it is “fair” to say PragerU indoctrinates children.

“It’s true we bring doctrines to children,” Prager told the group. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”

The bottom line message: The US is the best place ever. Its history is unblemished by any troubling episodes. Slavery was practiced in many societies, and white people should be credited with ending it.

PragerU is not an accredited university and it publicly says the group is a “force of good” against the left. It’s a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that produces videos that touch on a range of themes, including climate policies (specifically how “energy poverty, not climate change” is the real crisis), the flaws of Canada’s government-run healthcare system (and how the American privatized system is better), and broad support for law enforcement (and rejection of Black Lives Matter).

In some cases, the videos tell kids that their teachers are “misinformed” or “lying.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civics, Curriculum, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Florida, History, Lies, Propaganda

Matt Barnum: Pundits and Politicians Despair about Public Schools, But Parents Are Happy with Them

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
53

“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat summarized recent polls about public schools and noticed a sharp contrast between parents of public school students and non-parents.

Parents who have children in public schools are satisfied with them, based on their experience. But the general public swallows the negative narrative spewed by the mainstream media and rightwing politicians and thus has a sour view of public schools. This gap in perception has persisted for many years but seems to be increasing as Republican politicians like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis amp up their attacks on public schools.

Since it is not newsworthy to report that most parents are satisfied with their children’s public schools, the media loves to publish stories about crises and failure. Eventually, it becomes the conventional wisdom.

We have heard scare stories about the public schools with great intensity since the publication of the ominous “A Nation at Risk” report in 1983. That report, we now know, was purposely distorted to make public schools look bad. The commission that released that hand-wringing report had cooked the books to generate a sense of crisis. And they succeeded. The Reagan administration was alarmed, the nation’s governors were alarmed, the media stoked their fears. And for 40 years, the nation bought the lie.

But one group did not buy the lie: public school parents.

Barnum wrote:

The polling company Gallup has been asking American parents the same question since 1999: Are you satisfied with your oldest child’s education? Every year though January 2020, between two-thirds and 80% said yes.

The pandemic upended many things about American schooling, but not this long-standing trend. In Gallup’s most recent poll, conducted late last year, 80% of parents said they were somewhat or completely satisfied with their child’s school, which in most cases was a public school. This was actually a bit higher than in most years before the pandemic. A string of other polls, conducted throughout the pandemic, have shown similar results.

“Contrary to elite or policy wonk opinion, which often is critical of schools, there have been years and years worth of data saying that families in general like their local public schools,” said Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Categories Education Reform, Extremism, Fake News, Media, Opinion Polling, Parents, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Supporting public schools

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Big-Lie Ad Threatens Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
23

Journalist Thom Hartmann shows that Trump’s latest ad is an exercise in the Big Lie Technique. It contains vile smears that simple-minded people are likely to believe. It resounds with echoes of fascism.

He writes:

Trump’s people are promoting a new lie-filled fascist advertisement, which even the normally unflappable Frank Luntz called “disturbing.” It follows a fairly ancient pattern of destructive Big Lies that goes back to Renaissance Italy and even the Roman republic and ancient Greece.

German filmmaker Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists (he produced the infamous movie The Eternal Jew), said that two steps are necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it.

The first is to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” 

The second is to “repeat the oversimplification over and over.” 

If these two steps are followed, Hippler and Goebbels both knew, enough people will come to believe a Big Lie that it can change the politics of a nation.

In Hippler’s day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie “Campaign in Poland,” which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny — a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany — and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively “liberate” Poland.

Hitler took the “strong and decisive” path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler’s way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what’s most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. For somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli’s premise (in “The Prince,” 1532) that “the ends justify the means.”

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe — and then the world — in a thousand-year era of peace, which he claimed was foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it’s a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it…

In real life, it’s the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote America’s Founders while enforcing a brutal rule, of fossil fuel executives pushing for lax CO2 rules to “help the American economy,” of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Here in the US it was used by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to lie us into murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when there was little consequence to them personally or the GOP, Republicans decided to continue the Big Lie strategy and are using it to this day.

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about this, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kafka.

Be it “small sins” like the Green Party and No Labels getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or “big sins” like rightwing think-tanks working to turn America into a strongman oligarchy with their Project 2025, trying to accomplish a “good” by using the means of an “evil” like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Trump campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lies to assail President Biden and the very idea of democracy itself.

With the smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, Republican governors are rewriting American history (the Big Lie that white children are injured by learning about Black history), criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community (the Big Lie that queer people are “groomers”), and throwing millions of people in Blue cities off the voting rolls (the Big Lie of voter fraud).

They are pushing and celebrating nakedly fascist policies, tropes, and memes.

Most recently, a Trump-aligned group rolled out an ad that strings a whole series of Big Lies together. It says:

If I was the deep state and I wanted to destroy America, I would rig the election with a puppet candidate, one that was so compromised that they would never say a word about it. I would create a false flag that allows for mail-in ballots. I would be in charge of the ballot-counting machines. I would create a false flag to blame all who question the results of the election.

If I was the deep state, I would prosecute anyone that went against me. I would sue and prosecute anyone that spoke up about the fraudulent election. I would use my powers to shut down all your internet businesses and bankrupt you.

If I was the deep state, I would make everyone an example why you should never question a Democrat ever winning an election. I would imprison my foes. I would use my corrupt DAs and blackmail judges to destroy you. I would make sure all crimes I ever committed never happened. I would prosecute my biggest competition. I would make sure they could never run for office ever again.

If I was the deep state, I would convince everyone that Ukraine Nazis were good, and women are men.

If I was the deep state, I would own every politician that mattered.

If I was the deep state, I would push my pedophilia ambitions on you.

If I was the deep state, you’d question your sexual identity, but not the medical establishment.

If I was the deep state, you would fear to ever resist me.

If I was the deep state, you would wish I was really the devil.

If I was the deep state, I would say mission accomplished.

Frank Luntz wrote of it, “This is the most disturbing political ad I’ve seen this year.”

Defenders of the Trump campaign are overrunning social media, defending the lies and threats in this new ad and Trump’s previous, “If you fuck around with us…” statements. They claim that Joe Biden is reviving our economy with “socialism and communism,” and Jack Smith and the DOJ prosecuting Trump and the January 6th traitors is some sort of “deep state tyranny.”

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the work the administration is doing to punish seditionists and rebuild our economy from the wreckage of the Trump years and these sorts of naked appeals to fascism.

Truths and issues — however unpleasant — cannot be weighed on the same scale as lies, threats, and character assassination, explicit or implicit.

Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the “ends justify the means” technique of campaigning he had unleashed on behalf of Reagan and Bush was both immoral and harmful to American democracy.

“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his [Dukakis’] running mate,’” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”

But Atwater’s spiritual and political protégés in the Trump campaign soldier on. He and his GOP allies in Congress are using Big Lies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies are being resurrected almost daily, most on social media, right-wing talk radio, podcasts, and TV.

The most alarming contrast in the coming election of 2024 is between those who will use any means to get and hold power, and those who are unwilling to engage in a Big Lie.

History tells us that, over the short term, the Big Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the damage it does — both to those who use it, and to the society on which it is inflicted — is often incalculable.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Trump

Peter Greene: Oklahoma Superintendent Tries to Define “Woke,” But Can’t

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
86

Peter Greene discovered that Ryan Walters, the State Superintendent of Education in Oklahoma, attempted to define “Woke” on a far-right website. WOKE is one of those new terms of opprobrium, like “critical race theory,” that Republicans despise but can’t define. Peter eagerly read Walters’ effort to defund Woke, but came away disappointed. It seems that Woke is whatever you don’t like. You may have seen the stories recently about Walters insisting that the Tulsa race massacre of 2021 had nothing to do with skin color, although as the Daily Beast reported, “white mobs killed as many as 300 Black residents and burned some 1,600 homes and businesses in what was known as Black Wall Street.”

Peter Greene writes:

Oklahoma’s head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question–what the heck does “woke” mean? (I’ll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don’t recommend clicking through).

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I’m a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the “to wit” and remember that “restore back” is more clearly “restore.”

But he’s right. The term “woke” does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, “restore American education back to its foundation” is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don’t Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn’t. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at “opponents of this movement.” If we don’t know what the movement is, we don’t know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let’s press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they’re terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It’s a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it’s okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what “woke” actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well….

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don’t even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he’s talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he’s not going to do that. He’s going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that “naturally, this faction of individuals” is after schools to spread their “radical propaganda.” Still no definition of woke in sight. No–wait. This next start looks promising–

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That’s not helping, either. “Projection” is an odd choice–when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn’t change. There’s “projection” when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here (“I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world”) but that’s probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one “forces” projection. “Inaccurately-held” is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they’re being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple “inaccurate” would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are “anti-education,” because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect “education” means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of “nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means” which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Gender, History, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Oklahoma, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

Peter Greene: What Vouchers Will Do to West Virginia

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2023 //
4

Peter Greene looks into the Koch-funded voucher lobby in West Virginia and finds a fairly accurate portrayal of the dystopian future that lies ahead.

First, he details the background of the leaders of the voucher lobby. All have long-time connections to rightwing causes. Most were hired to push West Virginia’s expansive voucher plan, which passed in 2021.

If ever there was a state that needs a strong public school system, it’s West Virginia. But with big Koch money, the Koch puppets will make that impossible.

Instead of good public schools, West Virginians will have the “freedom” to find a good education on their own!

After identifying the staff and board, Greene writes:

So we’ve got the picture now– Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy (which belongs to the State Policy Network) is a Koch organization.

Cardinal Institute is all for the usual Koch version of liberty. They are pushing a West Virginia Miracle, and the four pillars are “Economic Freedom, Labor Freedom, Education Freedom, and Montani Semper Liberi – a culture of freedom.” They would like to promote “limited government, economic freedom, and personal responsibility.” They’ve got a podcast– “Forgotten America.” And they promise a “new paradigm”–

An “island” of poverty in the wealthiest country the world, West Virginia’s brighter future depends on a new paradigm – a new way of looking at the world with new ideas and a philosophy built on innovation, human flourishing, and a recognition that freedom is the greatest alleviator of poverty the world has ever seen. Ours is a philosophy built on the entrepreneur, the tinkerer in the garage, and the idea that small government means more room for people to create and build their own futures.

It’s a curious pitch in a state that is not exactly known for government overreach. West Virginia is a state with a history of labor struggles and a history of state government that exerts its power mostly to aid guys like Charles Koch. Regular people have always had plenty of room in this state that is renowned for its poverty— worst health, worst education levels, worst employment, and geography that makes it hard for basic infrastructure like roads and water and electricity and internet to reach some citizens. (And at least one community gutted by the departure of its WVU college campus–but hey, they’re free now.) It’s hard to imagine that any of these problems would be solved by less government, but libertarians gotta libertarian.

So what does Ballangee say about Mount Everest?

In his Education Next piece, Ballangee comes close to honesty about the larger goals of his particular arm of the school voucher movement. 

There is a common misconception among education reform advocates that passing universal choice legislation is akin to summiting Mount Everest. Upon universal choice’s enactment into law, it is done. Time to exhale and pop the champagne, for the mountain has been scaled.

In other words, voucher laws are not the end game. Simply making a voucher program available is not enough.

Next, the program has to be pushed and promoted. There will be a urge, then a steady growth “as families become aware of the program and hear from neighbors, fellow church attendees, and other connections about their new options” (just in case you had doubts about voucher ties to religion). Nut awareness must be built and PR must be provided to popularize the program.

Failure for an education choice program does not often come in the form of mistakes, fraud, or incompetence. More frequently, the problems are apathy and ignorance.

I don’t know. There’s an awful lot of fraud and incompetence in the school choice world. Nor am I sure how the lack of interest in a choice program is not the same thing as a lack of market demand. But of course modern marketing means creating a demand for your product. So, Ballangee asserts, somebody will need to work on that.

Someone will also need to build/attract a supply of educational “providers.” “Help private schools sign up,” he says, skipping over the question of why a successful private school would want to sign up. Somebody has to reach out to edupreneurs and get them signed up, too. Basically, be an education broker.

Now that choicers need to spend less time lobbying legislators, “the nexus of a successful program [he means a privatizing program, not an educational program] will shift somewhat from legislative considerations, lobbying, and bill design towards family outreach and relationship cultivation, specific government agency relationships, and broad marketing campaigns.”

Also, you’ll have to prepare for those “legions of entities” looking to “besmirch” the program (public education establishment, unions, union-friendly media). 

And this–

You have to figure out how – not if – to help the families about to embark on this journey for the first time…

You must figure out how to manage each “case” not only for the sake of the family and child but also for the overall health of the program.

There will be grandparents who have never used a computer now asked to upload a birth certificate on their grandchild’s behalf. There will be parents with limited education who know only one thing when it comes to navigating this fresh bureaucratic concoction: “my child needs something different.” Be sympathetic, but, more importantly, develop competence.

Learn the law and accompanying statutes backwards and forwards or find someone who does. You must have a path or contact for families to use. “I don’t know the answer, but I know someone who might” will become one of the most useful phrases in your reform handbook.

In short, Ballengee is outlining all the new business opportunities available on the mountaintop voucher peak. The only one he left out was the booming business in K-12 education loans for all those parents for whom state’s voucher won’t cover the cost of their education provider. Not only will government stop providing public education, but there are many opportunities to make a buck or ten in the newly free and unregulated marketplace of education stuff.

The Koch mountaintop

Because here’s what “freedom” means on Koch mountain– you are free to try to get to the top if you can, and I am free to ignore any of your problems (unless you pay me to help you), because the dream remains a world in which I have no responsibility to my fellow travelers on the earth (and certainly don’t have to pay taxes to provide services for Those People). 

Ballangee isn’t going to have any discussion of how well vouchers work as far as education goes (hint: not very well). But that’s okay, because, as he says, “education choice is good and a moral necessity.” I’m of the opinion that guaranteeing each child a decent education is the moral necessity, and, as always, I question the assumption that “education choice” must somehow involve the free market, one of the great unexamined assumptions of the modern choicer movement. Are choice and freedom important values in life? Damn right they are–which is why we as a society bear a responsibility for getting every child an education that will help them freely access more choices.

In the end, Ballengee’s mountain is one that Ayn Rand would probably approve of.

Though the last few steps up the mountain are the steepest and most difficult, they are also closest to what we are looking for when we embark on our journey: helping children find their own path to their own personal summit.

In other words, I’ve got my summit, Jack. Go find your own. 

“Helping” I suppose could mean choice advocates just helping out of the goodness of their hearts (though their hearts, bless them, don’t know much about actual education). But I suspect that help will be provided, for a price (or a cut of your voucher), to those who can find it and access it while navigating a sprawling unregulated complicated marketplace. It’s funny, because another thing we could do is collect all the experts in delivering education under one roof, where they’d be easy to find. And we could pay them with public tax dollars, and recruit and hire them with the understanding that they are there to help students climb their own personal mountain. But then some of us would have to pay taxes to fund it, and they might not be willing to make it all about christianist ideas. 

So instead, Koch-trained folks imagine a mountain, an Everest. By the way, do you know what Everest looks like these days? It’s a crowded mess of wealthy, resource-rich tourists who are hiring someone else to guide them. Well, that’s Everest.

The peak of the school voucher mountain looks a lot like wealthy, well-resourced folks looking down at the folks struggling on the slopes of other mountains and saying, “Well, don’t they look free. I wonder if they’ll make it.”

Categories Billionaires, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Poverty, Privatization, Propaganda, West Virginia

Judd Legum: The Pernicious Elite Obsession with RFK

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2023 //
14

Judd Legum writes here on his blog about the dangerous crusade of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. against vaccines and the pernicious support of his campaign by people like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. Kennedy’s claims about anti-vaccines have been debunked repeatedly by scientists, but that doesn’t faze him.

If his name were Robert F. Smith, no one would care what he says. But he’s trading on the family name to spread his crackpot views. Worse, he’s running for the Presidency, based on his famous name, and could be a spoiler. Trump loyalists like Steve Bannon are already talking up a Trump-Kennedy ticket. This would be funny, if it weren’t so dangerous, to public health and the future of our democracy.

Judd Legum wrote:

Every year, vaccines save millions of lives. Polio, which used to cripple and kill thousands of children in the United States, has been eliminated thanks to widespread vaccination. Diphtheria, which used to be the most common cause of childhood death in the United States, is exceedingly rare. Other serious illnesses, including measles, whooping cough, and tetanus, are no longer a pervasive threat. Overall there are more than 25 vaccines that can safely “prevent diseases, protect health throughout the lifespan, and help to prevent and mitigate outbreaks.”

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent the last two decades of his professional life using discredited, manipulated, and cherry-picked evidence to argue that life-saving vaccines are dangerous. Now Kennedy, part of the most famous family in American politics, is running for president.

Kennedy’s candidacy — and anti-vaccine propaganda — has attracted vocal support from a small but influential group of very wealthy people. Their support may not make Kennedy’s longshot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination viable. But it could help legitimize Kennedy’s lies about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. And the consequences could be lethal.

Last Thursday, Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who inked an exclusive deal with Spotify for $200 million, hosted Kennedy for a three-hour conversation. Kennedy told Rogan’s more than 10 million listeners that “vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” Rogan, a comedian and former host of Fear Factor, spent the entire episode validating Kennedy’s views. Kennedy was presented as a brave truth-teller, standing up to powerful forces. Anyone who doesn’t accept Kennedy’s conspiracy theories, according to Rogan, is unable to think for themselves.

Kennedy spent the better part of an hour rehashing an article he wrote in 2005, which falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are linked to autism. The article was so flawed it was ultimately retracted by the outlet that published it, Salon. “[C]ontinued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do,” Salon’s editor wrote.

In the piece, Kennedy relied extensively on the work of Mark Geier, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was revoked by Maryland in 2011. Geier pushed the vaccine-autism link as a frequent expert witness. He also misrepresented his credentials and developed “a ‘protocol’ for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically castrate sex offenders at a cost of upwards of $70,000 per year.”

More broadly, Kennedy alleged a massive, multi-decade coverup by governments, non-profits, and private industry to hide the dangers of “thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative” used in some vaccines. Kennedy quotes Mark Blaxill, a vehement opponent of vaccines, who claims that the harm done by vaccines is “bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.”

Kennedy’s “proof” was the Simpsonwood conference, a gathering of experts to discuss the possible links between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. Kennedy “relied on the 286-page transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting to corroborate his allegations—and wherever the transcript diverged from the story he wanted to tell, he simply cut and pasted until things came out right.”

For example, Kennedy quoted developmental biologist and pediatrician Robert Brent as saying: “We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits… This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country.” The implication is Brent was acknowledging the link between thimerosal and autism, and explaining why it should be covered up. But Brent actually said he was concerned that “junk scientist[s]” would misuse data to falsely claim that thimerosal in vaccines is linked to autism at the behest of “plaintiff attorneys.”

The link between thimerosal vaccines and autism has been disproven again and again by scientific studies. But even if Kennedy was right (he’s not), thimerosal has not been used in vaccines (except certain flu vaccines) since 2001. So the alleged dangers of thimerosal are not a reason to avoid vaccines today.

On the Rogan podcast, Kennedy simply waved away this inconvenient fact and continued to argue that life-saving vaccines are dangerous. Kennedy told Rogan that it could be aluminum in vaccines that is causing problems. But an adult typically ingests “7 to 9 milligrams of aluminum per day” through foods, and a typical vaccine has less than half a milligram. Infants will be exposed to far more aluminum through their diet than vaccines. And there is no scientific evidence that aluminum is linked to autism or any of the other health concerns cited by Kennedy. Perhaps that’s why Kennedy hedged. “There’s lots of other toxins in the vaccines that, you know, could be responsible,” he said.

Ivermectin inanity

Kennedy also used his appearance on Rogan’s podcast to falsely claim that COVID-19 vaccines are extremely dangerous and that people who take COVID-19 vaccines are significantly more likely to die. The data shows the opposite is true. A comprehensive study by the Commonwealth Fund “estimates that, through November 2022, COVID-19 vaccines prevented more than 18.5 million US hospitalizations and 3.2 million deaths and saved the country $1.15 trillion.”

According to Kennedy, thousands of athletes have died on the playing field as a result of taking the COVID-19 vaccines. There is no evidence to support this, and a large Australian study found “no association between out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and COVID-19 vaccinations.”

Kennedy claimed that ivermectin, which can treat river blindness in humans and is also useful as a horse dewormer, can effectively treat COVID-19. These facts, according to Kennedy, were covered up so that pharmaceutical companies could make money selling vaccines. At one point, Kennedy alleged that Bill Gates purposely funded studies in which people would be given lethal doses of ivermectin to discredit the treatment.

But ivermectin was studied repeatedly as a potential treatment for COVID-19. And it has been found repeatedly to be totally ineffective.

Joe Rogan told Kennedy that he took ivermectin when he contracted COVID-19 and credited it for his quick recovery. But Rogan also received monoclonal antibodies, an FDA-approved treatment for COVID-19 associated with a faster reduction in viral load….

Kennedy is benefiting from a steady stream of elite support to boost his profile and anti-vaccine advocacy. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, has formally endorsed Kennedy. Dorsey has avoided discussing Kennedy’s views on vaccines specifically but praised Kennedy for having an “edge” and “no fear in exploring topics that are a little bit controversial.” David Sacks, an investor and close associate of Elon Musk, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a prominent venture capitalist, hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for Kennedy this month.

Do any of Kennedy’s elite backers believe he has a real chance to be the next president? It’s unclear. But supporting Kennedy has become a trendy way to signal you have a rebellious streak. It’s a very dangerous game.

Categories Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Health, Hoax, Lies, Propaganda, Science

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Wants to Turn Back the Clock to 1931

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2023 //
96

Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly contrasts the views of Republicans and Democrats on the role of government. Republicans want it to be as minimal as possible. Democrats want it to use its powers and resources to improve people’s lives. Understanding this difference helps illuminate why Republicans want to get rid of public schools and why billionaires like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos support vouchers and libertarianism in a society where everyone is on their own.

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.

I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.

This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”

Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.” 

It is?

Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.

Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States. 

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity. 

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people. 

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism. 

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

So why is there a growing debt?

Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations. 

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent. 

“There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.

—

Notes:

Click to access rsc_2023_budget_final_version.pdf

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/11/18/nbsp-government-percent-fm/
https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts
https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/academics/research/faculty-research/new-deal/roosevelt-speeches/fr070232.htm
Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
https://rollcall.com/2023/06/14/conservatives-budget-plan-renews-battle-over-seniors-benefits/
Categories Biden, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, For-Profit, Freedom, Guns, History, Hope, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Koch Brothers, Pensions, Propaganda, Racism, Segregation, U.S. education, Unions, Vouchers

Kathryn Joyce: How Sarasota County Became Florida’s Laboratory for Far-Right Extremism

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2023 //
7

If you read one article today, make it this one.

Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.

Joyce begins:

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)

In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.

But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.

Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.

“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”

These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.

“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.

Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.

Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”

It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”

For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.

Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.

Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….

Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorseddozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Injustice, Lies, Parent Groups, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Safety, Shame, Students

NPE Releases New Report about Christian Nationalist Charter Schools, Funded with Taxes

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2023 //
16

The Network for Public Education released a new report today that should concern everyone who cares about public schools and the use of public resources. The report shows that a growing segment of the charter industry is controlled by Christian nationalists, who indoctrinate their students, using taxpayer dollars.

Contact: Carol Burris

cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org

(646) 678-4477

NEW REPORT DOCUMENTS HOW FAR-RIGHT CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE FUELING THE CULTURE WARS

Right-wing Republicans involved in the creation and governance of charter schools

American taxpayers across the country are funding the recent explosion of growth in far-right, Christian nationalist charter schools, including those affiliated with Hillsdale College, according to a new report, A Sharp Right Turn: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda, released by the Network for Public Education (NPE) today.

NPE identified hundreds of charter schools, predominantly in red states, that use the classical brand or other conservative clues in marketing to attract white Christian families. From featured religious music videos to statements that claim they offer a faith-friendly environment, these charter schools are opening at an accelerated rate, with at least 66 schools in the pipeline to open by 2024. While some of these schools, such as the Roger Bacon Academies, are long-standing, nearly half of the schools we identified opened after the inauguration of Donald Trump–representing a 90% increase.

The report exposes how right-wing Republican politicians, including Congressman Byron Donalds of Florida and failed Colorado gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, have embroiled themselves in creating and governing these schools, with some benefiting financially. In fact, NPE found that right-wing charters are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit management companies than the entire charter sector.

According to NPE Executive Director Carol Burris, who co-authored the report with journalist Karen Francisco, “Sectarian extremists and the radical right are capitalizing on tragically loose controls and oversight in the charter school sector to create schools that seek to turn back the clock on civil rights and education progress. These schools teach their own brand of CRT–Christian Right Theory–capitalizing on and fueling the culture wars. As a taxpayer, I am appalled that my tax dollars are seeding such schools.”

Since 2006, the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter School Programs (CSP) has funneled more than one hundred million dollars to begin or expand right-wing charter schools.

NPE President and education historian Diane Ravitch commented, “Few doubt that the religious right has decided to stake its claim on the next generation of hearts and minds with its unrelenting push for vouchers and book and curricular bans. This report exposes the lesser-known third part of the strategy—the proliferation of right-wing charter schools. It should be a wake-up call to those with progressive ideals who have embraced charter schools. A movement you support is now taking a sharp turn right to destroy the values you cherish.”

To learn more about the rapid growth of right-wing charter schools and their connections with right-wing politicians and the religious right, you can read the full report here.

The Network for Public Education is a national advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools for current and future generations of students.

###

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Lies, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, U.S. Department of Education
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »