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Chris Rufo Takes a Victory Lap with Claudine Gay’s Scalp

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2024 //
109

Chris Rufo, far-right provocateur, proclaimed his pride in toppling the President of Harvard. Is he happier with this victory than with his success in turning “critical race theory” into a national scare? Hard to say. This was a big one for Chris, not least because he found a way to incite the liberal media and to walk away with Dr. Gay’s scalp.

He boasted to Politico about his latest triumph.

In recent weeks, Rufo has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign, which began after she delivered controversial testimony before Congress in early December about Harvard’s handling of alleged instances of antisemitism stemming from the war in Gaza. On Dec. 10, Rufo and the conservative journalist Christopher Brunet publicized accusations that Gay — the first Black woman to serve as Harvard’s president and a political scientist held in high regard by her peers — had plagiarized other scholars’ work. Together with pressure from donors about Gay’s response to the war in Gaza, those accusations ultimately led to Gay losing her job this week.

None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”

While the extent of Gay’s alleged plagiarism is being disputed in the academic community, Rufo’s campaign worked because instances in which Gay apparently borrowed language from other scholars were frequent and credible enough that the allegations stuck.

For an operative who works mostly behind the scenes of Republican politics, Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.

As Rufo makes clear, his real target was diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he successfully painted Dr. Gay as the embodiment of DEI, meaning that she was a diversity hire and didn’t deserve her position.

He explained his strategy:

It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.

Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.

Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?

It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.

He makes clear that the issues are not important: what matters is winning and shaming the left.

I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful….

What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?

My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.

Peter Greene goes into Rufo’s strategy of announcing his goal, then turning the media coverage into a horse race.

Christopher Rufo is on the dead bird app bragging that he took down the president of Harvard and announcing that he’s going to start “plagiarism hunting,” which sounds so much better than “going after liberal Black academics.”

It is just the most recent demonstration of the Rufo technique, which is to announce the bad faith argument he’s about to launch and how he plans to use it to pwn his chosen liberal target. And then various main stream media and other well-intentioned folks proceed to amplify and engage with that bad faith argument. Even now, social media features a bunch of folks arguing about the plagiarism piece of the Harvard take down (“Well, you know the president of Rufo’s New College won’t get caught plagiarizing because he’s never published anything! Ha! Gotcha!!”) as if the plagiarism is actually the point. And media outlets keep publishing their “Harvard president taken down by plagiarism” takes as if that’s the real story here.

The New Republic took pleasure in revealing that Rufo claimed a master’s degree from Harvard, but he fudged by not admitting that the degree was not from the highly selective Harvard programs but from the Harvard Extension School, which I confess I never heard of.

It’s very hard to gain admission to Harvard College or graduate schools. But Harvard Extension School says this in its website:

Simply Enroll—No Application Required

To get started, simply follow these steps:

Readers may recall that I supported Dr. Gay and urged the Harvard Corporation to resist the pressure from Rufo. I did so because I knew that the campaign to force her out was not conducted in good faith. Rufo doesn’t care about anti-Semitism, nor does Elise Stefanik. I don’t recall either of them expressing outrage when anti-Semites chanted “The Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville nor did they speak out when Trump said that there were “good people” on both sides. Neither of them appears to care about anti-Semitism when it’s right in front of them.

As for “truth” and “beauty,” Rufo is blowing smoke. To him, they are just buzzwords. Faculty at the University of Texas called his bluff when he appeared there. Rufo spoke at a center at UT sponsored by Republican donors, and the attendees roasted him.

Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”

The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”

“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”

Rufo was exposed as a phony and called out for his connections to white supremacists. He beat a hasty retreat.

Freedom of expression and academic freedom are wonderful in action.

If you have never seen Rufo explain “laying siege to the institutions, watch his Hillsdale College speech.

Categories Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Higher Education, Propaganda, Racism

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

North Carolina: Sampson County’s Environmental Nightmare

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2023 //
3

Billy Ball’s blog, “Cardinal & Pine,” tells the horrifying story of the poisoning of people in Sampson County, North Carolina, and the malign neglect of the state’s officials. Most of those poisoned by the foul environment are Black and poor.

He writes:

NORTH CAROLINA — A dead vulture hangs by its feet, tied to a street sign on Chesters Road in Sampson County.

It’s there because locals believe the decomposing scavenger will deter other vultures. Sometimes, especially in the summer, the carrion birds descend like a plague on the Snow Hill area of Sampson County, a predominantly Black community that’s within retching distance of the largest landfill in NC. When it’s hot and humid in the summer, the vultures are so thick that the trees look black.

The birds are the least of locals’ worries.

The 85-acre landfill smells like hell. It gets in your lungs and steals your breath. On a bright, clear day, it can give you a headache and make you nauseous. When it’s hot, humid, or rainy, the smell is overwhelming.

Worse still, the landfill—which ranks second in the nation for emissions of the greenhouse gas methane—is contaminated with PFAS. PFAS are synthetic compounds used in nonstick pans, firefighter foam, cosmetics, and other products. It’s linked to cancers, birth abnormalities, high cholesterol and other ailments, but until this year, the US Environmental Protection Agency was silent on regulating it.

In March, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who’s from NC, called it “one of the most pressing environmental and public health concerns in the modern world.”

The federal regulations, which wouldn’t go into effect until 2026, are late but not unwelcome. Testing in almost 50 water systems in NC has reportedly found high levels of PFAS over the last five years. That’s the case in about 45% of the nation’s drinking water, according to federal regulators. It attacks your thyroid, your liver, and your kidneys. And it’s an open question what treatment systems are best for filtering out this “forever chemical,” so named because it doesn’t break down in the human body or the environment.

PFAS pollution is just one of the crises here. Sampson County—population 58,000— is beset by environmental nightmares, locals say. There’s the landfill, the poultry and pork farms (including the massive Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods plant), and multiple industrial operations that locals say are noisy, ugly, and making them sick.

There are a few dozen hogs per person. To dispose of the waste, farms have been spraying it onto fields. Neighbors say it’s giving them respiratory problems. There’s science behind it, including studies from 2018 and 2022 that found people living close to animal farming operations are more likely to get sick, sometimes very sick.

A small UNC-Chapel Hill study published in 2020also found PFAS in surface water around the landfill.

The well water that thousands of people here depend on—particularly in the poorer, rural areas—is making them sick too, locals say. But unlike other areas of the county, which have gradually been connected to the county water system, most of the low-income folks have been left to protect themselves against rust, iron, arsenic, and other harmful things that are turning up in their well water.

Michigan has Flint. North Carolina has a lot of Flints, and the biggest might be Sampson County.

‘You can’t win for losing’

“We have a story to tell in Sampson County and nobody’s paying any attention to us,” says Sherri White-Williamson.

White-Williamson is a native of the area, the daughter of two high school teachers—one a World War II veteran who taught her to get involved in her community. She worked for the EPA and other federal offices before returning to Sampson County. Now, she leads a local nonprofit called Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN). She has her work cut out for her.

EJCAN is helping state officials find locals in the Snow Hill area—not to be confused with the incorporated town of the same name in nearby Greene County—who could benefit from a $1 million grant from President Biden’s administration. The grant’s meant to test the well water and, possibly, help find a solution. If anything, it’s just a start.

Testing in this broad, eastern NC county has been slow. State officials are looking for volunteers. They’ve gone door-to-door. But many don’t trust the scientists and regulators showing up. They also don’t trust what comes out of their taps. If they have the money, which many of them don’t, they rely on bottled water.

The NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and researchers have confirmed PFAS contamination in the area, although state regulators have not made a final determination on the source. Most are pointing at the privately-operated landfill, which is known to have PFAS in it. For now, the state’s administering bottled water to homeowners with polluted water, although PFAS contaminants aren’t just harmful in drinking water. They can also travel through the air.

Then there are the pigs. Smithfield Foods and other hog farms make up a powerful economic force around here. Pork accounts for more than 6,100 jobsin Sampson County and Smithfield is the largest single employer in the county.

The people who live next to hog farms might be miserable, but the political pull of pork is immense. When locals began winning huge multi-million dollar jury awards from hog farmers working for Chinese-owned Smithfield, Republican state legislators intervened on the farmers’ behalf, rewriting statutes to all but ban such lawsuits.

“You can’t win for losing,” White-Williamson says when talking about the state legislature.

Please open the link and keep reading to finish the post.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Failure, North Carolina, Racism

Why Did Americans Abandon the Greatest Economy in History?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
43

This excellent article in The Atlantic by Rogé Karma should be widely read. Something changed radically in our economy and our society in the past several decades, limiting access to “the American Dream.” He explores the reasons why.

He writes:

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition…

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes…

The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

In the remainder of the article, the author says that the nation is at an inflection point, ready for a change. But what that change will be determined by voters next year.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Elections, History, Racism, Republicans

Why States Should Reject Vouchers: They Reduce Opportunity for Most Kids at a High Price for Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2023 //
12

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in D.C. issues reports on high-profile issues. This one should be in the hands of every legislator, school board member, and policymaker. It succinctly explains why states should not authorize vouchers.

Iris Hinh and Whitney Tucker wrote this report, which was published in June 2023. One conclusion is clear: vouchers inflict damage on public schools, attended by the vast majority of children, while helping affluent families. .

Hinh and Tucker write:

K-12 school vouchers are typically funded through state revenues and give families a set amount of money per eligible student to cover a portion of private school tuition. These vouchers divert money away from public schools, sometimes by directly re-routing education funding to private schools, and other times indirectly by making it harder to pay teachers, buy new textbooks, and provide quality after-school programming. The support for public schools is high: families overwhelmingly support their schools, and many teachers and other advocates for public education oppose vouchers.[1]

In the past few months, state lawmakers have expanded and created a record number of school voucher programs with little to no limits on eligibility. This will deplete available state revenues for public education and other critical services and do little to expand opportunity for students.

Regardless of whether school vouchers directly or indirectly divert funding from public schools to private education, state K-12 funding formulas depend on some metric of student count to allocate per-pupil funding. Some school districts can absorb some of the cuts with layoffs and reduced spending on textbooks and supplies. But fixed expenses such as air conditioning, school buses, and building maintenance can lead to funding shortfalls and layoffs.

In early 2023, these states created or expanded their school voucher policies:

  • Nebraska passed the state’s first voucher program, a K-12 tuition tax credit initially capped at $25 million annually, though the cap could rise to $100 million a year depending on demand for tax credits. Individuals and businesses can donate up to half of their taxes owed (with a maximum of $100,000); donations are funneled to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs), which pay private school tuition and other eligible expenses on behalf of students and their families. The tax credits reduce tax liability and thus, decrease the state revenues available for investments in public services, including public schools. Public school advocates are planning to challenge the bill on the 2024 ballot.
  • Arkansas’ LEARNS Act created, among other harmful policies for public education and teachers, an education savings account (ESA) program, which will phase in universal eligibility by the 2025-2026 school year and provide state-funded vouchers for families to use toward private school tuition and several other allowable expenses (like homeschooling, exam fees, and tutoring).
  • Florida broadened eligibility requirements to make its existing ESA program available to all students (rather than only students with disabilities or those from low-income families), with an estimated cost of $4 billion in the first year of implementation.
  • Iowa created an ESA that is initially targeted to families with lower incomes. But it will expand over time to include all students by the 2025-2026 school year and cost over $340 million per year when fully in effect.
  • South Carolina expanded the state ESA, lifting household income eligibility to 400 percent of the federal poverty level beginning in 2026-2027, but placing a 15,000-student cap on the program.
  • Utah created an ESA starting in the 2024-2025 school year that is available to all students but gives priority to students based on their household’s income.

Other states should not follow the paths of these states. For one, school vouchers primarily benefit wealthier students, families, and businesses. States with existing voucher programs — Arizona, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin — have reported that most families who benefitted were already covering the costs of private schools and homeschooling prior to the voucher becoming available.

Wealthy people and companies also benefit when vouchers take the newer form of K-12 tuition tax credits. People and companies who donate to SGOs are allowed to opt out of paying tax to fund public needs and instead fund tuition scholarships at private K-12 schools. This tax incentive can provide state credits — up to 100 percent of the donation — to families with incomes over $200,000 and even allows businesses to profit from claiming federal expense deductions and avoiding capital gains tax.

Vouchers can also increase the likelihood that students experience discrimination and harm. Private schools are not required to offer the same federal civil rights protections for students as public schools. In fact, many voucher bills explicitly require families to waive students’ protections and rights under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for educational services that students with disabilities may need to learn.

Further, vouchers do not necessarily expand opportunities for students with the greatest needs. Students from families with low incomes often face barriers to navigating the voucher application and private school admission processes. Smaller, rural areas often rely on their local public schools as community hubs and primary sources of employment. Private schools can more easily push students out without recourse based on how they style their hair, what they wear, test scores, and subjective disciplinary action.

Voucher costs often grow beyond what is projected and thus, reduce overall revenues for other state spending. A recent study of school voucher programsin seven states shows how state voucher spending from 2008 to 2019 increased by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, while K-12 spending for public education declined despite public school enrollment increases. Arizona became the first state to implement a universal voucher program in 2022, and as of mid-March 2023, the ESA program is expected to cost the state at least $345 million more than initial projections for the first year. New Hampshire’s voucher program was estimated to cost $130,000 in 2021 and it now costs $14.7 million. And a few private schools in Iowa are already raising tuition only a few months after the new voucher program passed in January of this year.

Some state lawmakers understood the great cost at the expense of public services and stopped multiple school voucher bills this year. For example, 16 House Republicans broke with their party to defeat Georgia’s universal voucher proposal in the final hours of session. And Idaho Senate Republicans raised concerns about the long-term cost of a universal ESA bill, which also applied to subsequent voucher bills.

As some states continue to debate school vouchers during legislative sessions, state lawmakers should understand that their actions now and in the future will have large fiscal and harmful consequences for public education and student opportunities.

Another state that did NOT pass vouchers was Texas, even though Governor Greg Abbott called four special sessions of the legislature. Rural Republicans refused both bribes and threats and voted against vouchers because they wanted to protect their community schools.

More States Are Considering Harmful School Voucher Proposals in 2023

The graph above appeared in an earlier version of this report, published in March 2023.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Privatization, Racism, Vouchers

Watch Dr. Marvin Dunn, the Brave Scholar of Black History in Florida

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2023 //
12

At the recent conference of the Network for Public Education, one of the truly outstanding speakers was Dr. Marvin Dunn, professor emeritus at Florida International University. Dr. Dunn has written several books about Black history in Florida, most notably A History of Florida Through Black Eyes. I read that book and realized that Dr. Dunn was the right recipient for NPE’s annual “David Award,” which goes to someone who spoke out and acted on behalf of justice against the powerful, regardless of the personal risks.

Dr. Dunn is not only an author but an active preservationist of Black history. To make sure that the massacre at Rosewood, Florida, would never be forgotten, he bought five acres there and regularly brings students and teachers to learn about it. He tells the story of visiting his land with his son; a “neighbor” tried to run them over in his truck. Dr. Dunn filed a complaint with the police, and the man was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Dr. Dunn asked to have the sentence reduced, and it was dropped to only one year. The audience was impressed by his generosity of spirit. However, Dr. Dunn tweeted several weeks later that the now-released felon hung a toy skeleton where Dr. Dunn could see it. You don’t need to study Critical Race Theory to know that Racism lives.

I think you will agree that his remarks are highly inspiring.

Categories DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, History, Injustice, Justice, Network for Public Education, Race, Racism, Research

Watch This! Gloria Ladson-Billings Speaks at NPE Conference about Attacks on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2023 //
6

If you missed the 10th annual conference of the Network for Public Education, you missed some of the best presentations in our ten years of holding conferences.

You missed the brilliant Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor Emerita and formerly the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ladson-Billings gave an outstanding speech that brought an enthusiastic audience to its feet. She spoke about controversial topics with wit, charm, wisdom, and insight.

Fortunately, her presentation was videotaped. If you were there, you will enjoy watching it again. If you were not there, you have a treat in store.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Network for Public Education, Parents, Privatization, Racism, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching

How the Metropolitan Museum Acquired a Rare Painting with an Enslaved Person

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2023 //
3

This story is fascinating. It’s about the quest to understand the origins of a painting of three white children that originally included a young slave. At some point, the enslaved youth was painted over and eliminated.

One determined art collector enlisted the help of art historians to identify the white children and the enslaved youth. The young man was named Bélizaire. The painting was held for decades in storage in a New Orleans art museum. It was just another family painting: three children. If you can open the video, please do (I don’t know if it is behind a pay wall).

Once the original painting was restored and its history documented, it was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is prominently displayed.

“How a Rare Portrait of an Enslaved Child Arrived at the Met” is a 10-minute film that touches on themes of race, art and history.

For many years, a 19th century painting of three white children in a Louisiana landscape held a secret. Beneath a layer of overpaint meant to look like the sky: the figure of an enslaved youth. But a 2005 restoration revealed him and now the painting has a new, very prominent home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Who was the enslaved child? Who covered over his figure? Why did the painting languish for decades in attics and a museum basement?

The Times further describes the journey of the painting:

To learn more, read “‘His Name Was Bélizaire’: Rare Portrait of Enslaved Child Arrives at the Met.” Alexandra Eaton writes:

One reason “Bélizaire and the Frey Children” has drawn attention is the naturalistic depiction of Bélizaire, the young man of African descent who occupies the highest position in the painting, leaning against a tree just behind the Frey children. Although he remains separated from the white children, Amans painted him in a powerful stance, with blushing cheeks, and a kind of interiority that is unusual for the time.

Since the Black Lives Matter movement, the Met and other museums have responded to calls to reckon with the presentation of Black figures. When the European Galleries reopened in 2020, the museum included wall texts to highlight the presence of African people in Europe and to call attention to issues of racism, previously unmentioned. In the American Wing, which had presented “a romanticized history of American art,” Kornhauser said, a presidential portrait was recast with the consciousness of the present: John Trumbull’s 1780 portrait of George Washington and his enslaved servant William Lee identified only the former president until 2020, when Lee’s name was added to the title. However, unlike Bélizaire, Lee is depicted at the margins, lacking in any emotion or humanity.

Jeremy K. Simien, an art collector from Baton Rouge, spent years trying to find “Bélizaire” after seeing an image of it online in 2013, following its restoration, that featured all four figures. Intrigued, he kept searching, only to find an earlier image from 2005, after the painting had been de-accessioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art and was listed for auction by Christie’s. It was the same painting, but the Black child was missing. He had been painted out.

“The fact that he was covered up haunted me,” Simien said in an interview.

Categories Art, Civil Rights, History, Race, Racism

Jan Resseger: Reflecting on the 10th NPE Conference

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2023 //
0

In case you missed the Network for Public Education’s 10th annual conference, Jan Resseger gives you here a brief overview.

It was a well-planned conference with great speakers and panels. Every year, we say, “This was the best ever.” We said it again this time. How will we top this next year? The presentations of the keynote speakers were recorded and I will post them.

Jan Resseger writes:

It was while I was traveling home from last weekend’s Network for Public Education Conference that I realized I had not once heard Miguel Cardona’s name mentioned—even though the meeting was in Washington, D.C. Miguel Cardona is, of course, the U.S. Secretary of Education.

This year’s conference felt different than earlier conferences, when worries about federal policy brought by previous Secretaries of Education became a unifying focus. Rod Paige brought us “the Texas Miracle,” the test-and-punish model policy that spawned No Child Left Behind. Arne Duncan bribed the states with huge federal grants if they agreed to adopt his favorite Race to the Top priorities. And Betsy DeVos talked on and on about her favorite subject, school privatization.

Federal policy can be helpful or harmful for public schools. But with Miguel Cardona’s quiet management style and in the context of a badly divided Congress, any chance of our framing a collective narrative response to a nationwide policy has faded. It is, of course, true that a lot of awful remnants of the No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top era, like the federal Charter Schools Program that continues to support privately operated charter schools, remain in federal law. The remains of Race to the Top also still clutter the laws from state to state. But except for the Network for Public Education’s dogged effort to end funding for the federal Charter Schools Program, the focus on federal advocacy at this year’s conference seemed to have become limited. Keynoters were clear, however, that the attack on absolutely essential Title I funding from House Republicans is being vigorously countered by the Biden administration and in the U.S. Senate.

At last weekend’s conference it was clear that today the most damaging education policy is emerging in the 50 state legislatures, a situation which creates a challenge for collective advocacy. While states like Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio are all facing school funding shortages and concurrent growth in the diversion of state dollars to school vouchers, state laws and state politics make it extremely challenging for advocates even in these three similar states to pull together a coherent and moving universal narrative that also accounts for each state’s wonky legislative differences. At last week’s conference, workshops on the implications of state policy informed participants about work to reform Pennsylvania’s charter schools; to defend public schools from Ron DeSantis’s attack on teaching inclusive history in Florida; to push back against state takeovers in Houston, Lorain, Ohio, and Nashville; to inform the public about school funding lost to tax abatements in Kansas, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Missouri; to press for the end of portfolio school reform in Denver; and to help parent and teachers union advocates work together to build support for investment in equitable public schools as they did during teachers’ strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland.

Opposing the Growth of School Privatization via Vouchers

In this year of explosive growth of private school tuition vouchers across the states, several workshops explored the evidence that vouchers don’t fulfill the promises of their proponents. Experts presented research findings demonstrating that parents sign away their children’s constitutional protections when they accept a voucher to send a child to a private school. One researcher described the result as “the outsourcing of discrimination.” Another presented peer-reviewed research showing that students’ test scores in both math and reading dropped significantly after they took a voucher to attend a private school, and that many return suddenly to the public school district when their voucher school forces them out for one reason or another or she school suddenly closes. Public schools are prohibited by law from routinely expelling students; private schools accepting vouchers often push out children with special needs or those who do not fit their school’s profile.

Several workshops examined the fiscal damage when states divert massive tax dollars to uncapped voucher and Education Savings Account programs, which are often unregulated and poorly managed. Public Funds Public Schools, a collaboration of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center, shared its website that tracks voucher schemes across the states and provides up to date resources for advocacy. Two workshops presented full-service Community Schools, which are likely to become any family’s best school choice as medical, family, and community services are located right inside the neighborhood public school.

Refusing to Be Distracted by the Far-Right Culture Wars

Another factor creating today’s difficult public education policy climate is the massive investment in racist and homophobic “culture war” disruption by billionaire philanthropists and dark money groups. In A Citizen’s Guide to School Privatization, a new resource just published on the Network for Public Education’s website, Massachusetts political science professor Maurice Cunningham traces the dangerous groups working together to rile up and divide parents and distract us all from more constructive efforts to strengthen public schooling and make our schools more inclusive. The result? “Chaos is the product. It’s a lot easier to break something than to build something or to improve upon it.”

In a workshop last weekend, Cunningham described some of the research he has published in his new, and well documented Citizen’s Guide, for example, the following about the national organization that basically funds and operates Moms for Liberty: “The Council for National Policy… brings together wealthy conservatives, many from the oil and gas realm; Christian evangelists with vast communications networks; and groups that can turn out groups like the National Rifle Association. The Council for National Policy is a central directorate passing down plans to ‘obedient franchises’ like Moms for Liberty. The key Council for National Policy members that oversee Moms for Liberty are the Leadership Institute and Heritage Foundation. They run the annual summits, provide the training and literature, and even sue the Biden administration on Moms for Liberty’s behalf.”

What About the Separation of Church and State?

One workshop last weekend brought researchers from Documented to explore the Christian Right organization, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, which has worked to develop a legal strategy to confront public schools around the idea that “public schools are indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion.”

While private schools accepting vouchers have been quietly teaching religion for years and at the same time failing to protect the rights of their students, in a workshop last weekend three legal experts set out to clarify the issues posed by an explicitly religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City has proposed to open. The presenters explored the question legally: whether, as publicly funded private contractors, charter schools are “state actors.” The issue is so complex in terms of legal precedents that even among the presenters there was subtle disagreement.

Participants in this and another workshop I attended seemed concerned about the broader constitutional question of the separation of government and religion. Many seemed clearly to grasp the importance of the first Amendment’s Establishment Clause’s protection of church-state separation, and many were concerned and confused about the current U.S. Supreme Court’s reliance on the Free Exercise Clause instead. It seemed a good thing that staff from Americans United for Separation of Church and State were workshop presenters in this year’s Network for Public Education conference to help clarify the issues around the current U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of religious liberty.

Working for Racial Justice

Many of the leaders and powerful speakers at last week’s conference identified racism and its lingering role as the greatest factor undermining children’s experience in public school along with the unequal school funding from state to state that regularly disadvantages Black and Brown children. It is clear that today’s attacks on the honest teaching of American history, on critical race theory, and on “diversity, equity and inclusion” are a blatant attempt to marginalize Black, immigrant, and gay, lesbian, and transgender children and adolescents.

Last weekend we heard about and talked about what happens when Ron DeSantis and others attack “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts as “woke.” Their goal is to ensure that schools can remain segregated by race and economics so that parents can protect their children from exposure to diversity; that state school funding schemes remain inequitable by favoring wealthy suburbs; and that public schools can exclude the history and culture and identity of some children from the curriculum and ban books about these children. Promoting homophobia and “fear of the other” is central to this agenda. Speakers throughout the event traced the advent of school vouchers back to the segregation academies that were a response to Brown v. Board of Education.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, the retired Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, seemed the perfect person to launch the conference’s opening plenary in this year filled with attacks on efforts by schools to protect diversity, multicultural education and authentic welcome for all students. Ladson-Billings’ own website introduces her as “known for her work in the fields of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory, and the pernicious effects of systemic racism and economic inequality on educational opportunities.” Keynoter, Dr. Marvin Dunn, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Florida International University, described his project to lead students on tours of the site of the 1923 Rosewood Massacre of an African American community in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis has attempted to suppress teaching about such events. A workshop highlighted the work of the Schott Foundation’s Opportunity to Learn Network along with the role of full-service Community Schools to house social, medical and community services to serve families and make them feel welcome and supported. Finally Jitu Brown and staff from the Journey for Justice Alliance introduced the Journey for Justice Alliance’s national Equity or Else Campaign for racial justice.

Remembering the Urgent Importance of Public Schooling for These Tough Times

Many of the event’s speakers called the growing attack on public education combined with rapid expansion of private school tuition vouchers and states’ investment in privately operated charter schools an existential threat to the primary institutions that anchor every small town, city neighborhood and suburb: the public schools that continue to educate the vast majority of our children and adolescents. As we strategize about how to push back against the threats to our public schools, however, the National Education Association’s Susan Nogan ended her workshop presentation with a reminder: “We must lead with our shared values.” Ladson-Billings opened the conference with a keynote entitled, “Regaining a ‘Public’ for Public Education.” Keynoter Julian Vasquez Heilig, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Western Michigan University declared, “Equity, inclusivity and democracy are what our public schools represent.” The American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten reminded a luncheon plenary: “Public school is the place where we do pluralism.”

I was reassured that despite a lot of worrying about threats to public education, speakers shared their confidence in the foundational principles underneath our American system of public schools. Public schools are publicly funded, universally available and accessible, and guaranteed by law to meet each child’s needs and protect all children’s rights. Public schooling represents not only individualist concern for one’s own children, but also a sense of obligation to all of the community’s children.

School privatization cannot move our society closer to these principles. Last week’s 10th Anniversary Network for Public Education Conference represented a commitment to work together to ensure greater equality of opportunity and to improve our public schools, but at the same time to affirm public education as the optimal educational institution for the investment of our efforts and tax dollars.

Categories Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Racism, Separation of church and state

Donna Ladd: How I Learned About Racism and Became a Journalist

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2023 //
10

Donna Ladd is the editor-in-chief of the Mississippi Free Press, which exemplifies the importance of brave, independent journalism. In this story, she relates her own journey from Mississippi to graduate school in New York City and back to Mississippi, where she leads a crucial news outlet whose staff and board is a model of racial integration. I am honored to be a member of the advisory board of the Mississippi Free Press.

She writes:

You may know that I grew up in Mississippi, but left the day after I got my political science degree from Mississippi State University, hightailing it north, vowing never to live in my racist, misogynistic state that tried to kill the spirit of smart young people like me ever again. I thought, naively, that I’d left all that ugly behind. The lessons about bigotry and sexism being a 50-state strategy were still ahead of me. Good Lord, there was so much I didn’t know.What I did know is that a bunch of political science profs believed in this child of an illiterate mother from Philadelphia, Miss.—Howard Ball, Ed Clynch, David Mason and Stephen Shaffer among them—and treated me like I was smart enough to learn what I didn’t know. My career path, I thought, was law school, even though I was always attracted to writing and truth-telling through journalism. Still, I didn’t exactly leave State with a lot of immediately marketable skills. I enrolled in George Washington University in Washington, D.C.—helped along by Dr. Ball’s reference; he compared me to an unsophisticated but promising Norma Rae—but the school and I didn’t match well. Truth be known, I wasn’t ready to succeed there.

So, I dropped out and became a club DJ. That ended up funding my teaching myself to be a writer and a journalist, first with dalliances with small newspapers in Colorado and New York City. I learned on the job.But it wasn’t until I was nearly 40 that I got more schooling—and remarkable for the daughter of Miss Katie, it was at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where I honed my journalism skills and learned both what to do and what not to do as an editor and trainer. As any honest success story will tell you, I internalized that who you know and how they’ll help you get into a job to learn and grow inside is a major key to anybody’s success, regardless of your college major.We begin or 22nd year of Free Press Journalism in Mississippi on Sept. 22. Help us celebrate with a gift of $22, $222, $2,200 or $22,000 on #MFPGiving22Day!

Put simply: I didn’t need a fancy j-school degree to become a journalist, but it helped me improve my skills and meet people so that my work would be read—and, these days, funded. But it was other Columbia studies as part of my mid-career master’s, with more diverse instructors and thinkers than in the j-school then, that turned me into the writer, thinker, entrepreneur and mentor I am now—and taught me never to prop up false narratives wherever they spring from.Bottom line: I cared about racism deeply, and I came to understand that it was my job as a white journalist to expose the perils of “whiteness” (not the same as light-colored skin) to us all, that it was my work to do especially as a child of Neshoba County who knew some famous lynch mobsters. I already knew white folks all around me in Mississippi (and the whole U.S., so don’t get cocky) were either actively working to extend race inequity to keep the reins of power—I mean, nothing has ever been more obvious so stop the act, people—but also that my early censored Mississippi education kept me from understanding the connections and pathways out of this sick mess.My real grad-school education came after I crept shyly into the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and asked Dr. Manning Marable to allow me into his Black Intellectuals graduate seminar. And I read, listened, thought. A lot. I had no idea that I would soon return to Mississippi—but I know now that my studies with Dr. Marable and my white adviser Andie Tucker (a former PBS producer) urging me to come home to Mississippi and report about race, or “whiteness,” rewrote my future.Help grow Free Press journalism in Mississippi with your donation today.

Not to mention the future of others. I brought home everything I learned in that imperfect Ivy League institution among many people who loved to spit at the South without checking their own postage stamps. It was there that I first really understood just how bad de facto northern racism was, thanks to Dr. Marable. I first learned about so many Black American heroes who should, damn it, also be my heroes and all of yours. But they can’t be if I didn’t know they existed, or what motivated them, or the sheer bravery they mustered to face likely death for trying to make this country live up to its own constitutional and patriotic hype.Without the thinking and probing I did in my “soft” studies about humanity at Mississippi State and Columbia, Free Press journalism would not exist in Mississippi. I would not have influenced, trained, cheer-led, mentored, and recommended so many young Mississippians over the years, trying to help them believe that we can change the trajectory and inclusion of our state and, thus, the nation. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have so many white people of all ages walking up to me in the grocery store to tell me “I just didn’t know” about so many things they were lied to about in school and our textbooks.Not to mention, I wouldn’t be running the second and third publications I co-founded here, choosing truth and accuracy over blind partisanship, giving raises, recruiting, training teenagers in marketable skills and brainstorming with the most amazing team of journalists I would ever hope to share a newsroom with. And I wouldn’t be pinching myself because several of my profs from both my colleges donate to my newsrooms in Mississippi, even Sam Freedman, who challenged me the most. That’s full circle, baby.

Thank you, Mississippi State, Columbia, Andie, Sam and Dr. Marable (please rest in peace) for helping bring me to this place right now where I can sit on my porch and tell my Mississippians not to believe the political hype, to reject censorship, and to stop fearing education and the other. We sink or swim together, and heroes come in so, so many forms. Don’t deprive yourself.

Oh, and study whatever you need to to find your purpose and path. There is more to life, growth and prosperity than learning to code if that’s not your jam.

Donna Ladd, Editor and CEO

From the website of the Mississippi Free Press:

Founding Editor and CEO Donna Ladd is an award-winning journalist, editor and social entrepreneur from Philadelphia, Miss. After leaving the state the day after she graduated from Mississippi State, vowing to never live here again, she returned 18 years later with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. She co-founded the impactful Jackson Free Press in 2002 in order to bring an in-depth news source to the state that would not shy away from historic effects of structural, institutional and systemic racism—how the past connects to the present—in a way no other media outlet had done in Mississippi.

Donna, the daughter of illiterate parents, has won many awards for columns, political columns, editorials, feature writing and investigative work, and has shared in a number of public-service journalism awards for her work in Mississippi, from helping put an old Klansman, James Ford Seale, in prison for the kidnapping and murder of two black teenagers in 1964, to deep systemic work on the causes and solutions of crime and violence now in the capital city and the embedded racism in the criminal-justice system since the time of slavery.

In 2001, Donna received a Packard Future of Children fellowship to study the discriminatory application of school discipline on children of color and the cradle-to-jail pipeline. More recently, she was a three-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation leadership fellow, deep diving into systemic inequity and pathways to “truth, racial healing and transformation” in her home state. The fellowship led to her efforts to change the narrative about race through the Mississippi Youth Media Project, which she started to train young people to challenge the media narrative about them and their communities. She has trained many award-winning journalists over the years.

She also had two fellowships to study racism in the criminal-justice system, through John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Penn Law School’s Quattrone Center, and two grants from the Solutions Journalism Network for the same work, which brought several of her dozens of journalism awards. In 2019, she had a Logan non-fiction fellowship at the Carey Institute for Global Good, where she did a five-week writing residency in upstate New York.

Ladd publishes long-form features in The Guardian related to racism, whiteness and criminal justice. She and her journalism have been covered in Glamour and Reason magazines, Next Tribe, CNN, NPR, CBC, CBS Radio, the BBC, al Jazeera, among other outlets. In 2017, Southern Living magazine named her as one of the “Innovators Changing the South.”

In 2011, Ladd was honored with a Fannie Lou Hamer Humanitarian Award, a Dress for Success Women of Strength Award in 2009 and the 2009 Angel Award from the Center for Violence Prevention for her work against domestic abuse. After surviving breast cancer, Ladd is the 2020 Survivor of the Year for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Jackson on April 25, 2020. She also was a 2020 alumni award winner from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 2020. In 2005, Ladd was named one of Mississippi’s 50 Leading Businesswomen by the Mississippi Business Journal, and she is the recipient of the 2006 Friendship Award, along with Mississippi (and now national) NAACP President Derrick Johnson, from Jackson 2000/Dialogue, a racial-reconciliation organization.

Categories Mississippi, Racism
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