Archives for category: Racism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: An Important Anniversary Today

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
21

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner publish a blog called “Steady,” which has a consistently steady tone while reflecting on our times. Only minutes ago, they called attention to an important event that occurred 75 years ago, when President Harry S Truman made history.

They write:

At Steady, we sometimes pause from the news of the day to look back and reflect on the journey our nation has taken. With this in mind, we want to acknowledge an anniversary that took place this past week that didn’t get enough notice, even if its importance is as relevant as ever.
On July 26, 1948 — 75 years ago — President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981. Its statement was simple but profound:

“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. …”

Black people had fought in every war in the country’s history, with great courage and sacrifice. They fought for a nation that violently denied their human rights. During World War II, more than a million Black men and women served in the armed forces, fighting fascism around the world only to return to a country infused with systemic and often bloody racism.

This stark dichotomy became appallingly apparent with the tragic story of Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr. He had enlisted in the Army in 1942 and served in the Pacific. After being honorably discharged from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, on February 12, 1946, Woodard boarded a Greyhound bus to see his family in North Carolina. He was wearing his uniform. En route in South Carolina, he was pulled off the bus and beaten by local police, then arrested, then beaten some more. The assault was so violent it left Woodard blind for life.

Woodard’s story soon became a defining moment in post-war race relations. Orson Welles called for justice on his ABC radio program. There was a benefit concert in Harlem headlined by Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie, and boxer Joe Louis. President Truman ordered a federal investigation, and in 1947 he became the first president to address the NAACP. He said in his speech:

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. And when I say all Americans — I mean all Americans.

A year later, Truman ordered the desegregation of the military and the federal workforce. There was, of course, tremendous pushback, and racism persisted in the recruitment and deployment of service members generally, and in the promotion of officers specifically.

(The act very nearly cost Truman his presidency. He almost lost his reelection bid in 1948 because some southern states — previously known as the Democratic Party’s “Solid South” — voted for a third-party “Dixiecrat” ticket. The ramifications of this series of events reverberate today.)

While the Air Force integrated quickly after 1948, the Army didn’t fully integrate until 1954, spurred on by a need to fill its ranks during the carnage of the Korean War. The Marines and Navy took much longer. It is shocking to consider, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s, under the leadership of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., then chief of naval operations, that the Navy was finally forced to fully confront its systemic racism.

In the ensuing decades, the U.S. military, while not entirely free from racism, has become a potent example for the nation of how our diversity is our strength. The military arguably has become the best meritocracy of any American institution. Seeing young men and women from different races, nationalities, cultures, religions, sexual identities, and geographic regions serve alongside each other sparks pride in what our country can and should be. They are beacons of hope.

Yet today, we are once again at a crossroads in the nation’s reckoning with its history. Right-wing extremists seek to downplay our legacies of injustice. We see this effort in distorted school curricula and banned books. We see it in politicians who use divisiveness as a tool to rally votes. The truth is, we still have a long way to go to make sure that the corridors of American power reflect the country as a whole. It should be noted that when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action recently, they exempted military academies. What is one to make of that?

It is vital that we confront what our nation truly was, and is. Surely it is just that we recognize the tremendous service of those who were denied full rights. White supremacy is on the rise, including among elements of the armed forces. Surely we should agree that this is a great danger needing to be rooted out.

Truman’s executive order was an important step toward our country’s making good on its founding ideals. Much hard work preceded that moment 75 years ago, and much has taken place after it. The journey continues, with new challenges in our present time. We can’t hope for continued progress if we don’t acknowledge the past, honor moments of justice, and vow to do the hard work to build upon them.

We can also find hope in President Truman’s own life story. He was a descendant of slave owners and Confederate sympathizers, and he grew up in a segregated town in Missouri. As a younger man, he himself identified as a segregationist and racist, but he was able to grow to become a champion for civil rights, at least by the standards of his time.

In Truman’s journey, we can find a mirror for the country at large. We have come a long way but still remain very much a work in progress. And the gains we have made are fragile without continued care and effort.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Freedom, Race, Racism, Segregation

Alan Singer: DeSantis’s Effort to Whitewash Florida’s African American History

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
8

Florida has a sordid history of racism but Governor DeSantis wants that history to be literally whitewashed so that no white students feels “uncomfortable” learning the truth. DeSantis opposes “woke” history that others call telling the truth.

Alan Singer of Hostra University explains here why it is so hard to sanitize Florida’s history of racism.

He writes:

On Twitter, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “In Florida, we require the truth about American history to be taught in our classrooms. We will not allow schools to twist history to align with an ideological agenda.”

As part of Florida’s campaign against undefined “wokeness,” the Department of Education banned the teaching of a new African American Studies Advanced Placement course. It rejected the course as lacking “educational value and historical accuracy” and for violating Florida law.

Last week, the Florida State Board of Education unanimously approved new standards for how Black history should be taught in the state. The standards are designed to define “anti-woke” education. In its response, the Florida Education Association (FEA) branded the standards “a disservice to Florida’s students” and “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.” Eleven Florida civil rights and education organizations including the FEA and the NAACP sent a letter to Florida Board of Education that it ignored. The letter charged that “these standards purposely omit or rewrite key historical facts about the Black experience.” Vice-President Kamala Harris called the Florida standards “an attempt to gaslight us.”

Two of the most controversial clarifications in the social studies standards include a statement in the 6-8 grade guidelines that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” and that instruction in high school on events like the 1920 Ocoee Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre that occurred in Florida should include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” acts of violence by African Americans that did not occur.

The major problems here are that Africans in Africa were agrarian people who had skills that were robbed from them when they were enslaved, and that enslaved Africans were considered property and any benefit from their skills accrued to their supposed owners. The Ocoee riots and murders occurred when African Americans attempted to vote in the Presidential election. In Rosewood, a mob of hundreds of whites murdered Black people they randomly caught and burned the town.

I found other statements and missing statements in the Florida social studies standards equally disturbing. The two places that refer to the Confederate states and the Civil War don’t mention which side Florida was on and which side African Americans fought for. Segregation is mentioned three times and the Klan is mentioned four times, but student do not learn what role they played in Florida.

But for me as a historian and a teacher the most disturbing part of the standards is the way slavery, and the slave trade are explained. It is intended to take responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery off the European countries that conquered and settled the Americas. “Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures,” “how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey),” and “how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.” Students “[e]xamine the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619.”

The lesson being taught in the Florida standards is that everybody had slavery and it was the same all over the world. But it wasn’t. Only the European colonies in the Americas and the new countries including the United States had race-based chattel slavery where enslaved people were no longer considered human, and their status was inherited by their children. Even after slavery ended as a result of the Civil War, Florida and the other states in the former Confederacy instituted laws to keep African Americans in virtual bondage and white Southerners enforced those laws through vigilante groups like the Klan.

Florida has many reasons to want to bury its sordid racial history. In the first have of the 19th century white settlers massacred and expelled Florida’s Native Americans.  Between 1870 and 1950, 311 African Americans were lynched in Florida. Three Florida counties, Lafayette, Taylor, and Baker were especially notorious. Florida had some of the strictest Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1881, it banned interracial marriage and in 1885 it mandated racially segregated schools. The interracial marriage ban was added to the Florida State Constitution in 1944. Starting in 1927, it was a criminal offense for a teacher to teach someone of a different race. At least 50 African Americans were murdered in Ocoee, Florida on November 2, 1920, after local Blacks attempted to vote. On January 1, 1923, white rioters stormed through the African American community of Rosewood, Florida, burning the town to the ground, killing six people, and driving the rest of the population into the forest and swamps to escape.  On August 27, 1960, peaceful Black students conducting a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Jacksonville were attacked by a mob of over 200 whites armed with baseball bats and ax handles. No African American student was permitted to earn a bachelor’s degree from the formerly segregated University of Florida until 1965.

Solomon Northup was a free Black man living in New York State who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northup’s memoir, published after he escaped from slavery, was made into movies in 1984 and 2013. There is a scene in the 1984 PBS version of Solomon Northup’s Odyssey where Master Epps and friends are sitting on the veranda arguing with a Canadian carpenter named Bass about the legitimacy of slavery. Northup is near by trimming hedges and overhears the debate. Bass tells the story of a runaway who was captured and brought to court. The judge is puzzled why the enslaved African attempted to escape when he was fed and not beaten. The African replied “That job’s still there if you want to go ask for it.”

Maybe, with his Presidential campaign flailing, Ron DeSantis should apply for a job like that and get some skills.

Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
Teaching Learning Technology
284 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196

Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present my views and not those of Hofstra University.

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Fraud, History, Injustice, Lies, Racism

D.C. Mayor Proclaims “Whistleblower Day” to Honor Those Fired for Telling the Truth

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2023 //
31

Whistleblower Marlon Ray was fired for complaining about lucrative contracts awarded by DC Public Schools to the Relay Graduate School of Education, which is the educational equivalent of a three-dollar bill. Ray was fired along with elementary school principal Dr. Carolyn Jackson-King, who refused to implement Relay’s “no-excuses” model in her school. She said it was racist. They are suing the district.

Yet Marlon Ray, the whistleblower, who is suing the city, somehow persuaded Mayor Muriel Bowser to proclaim July 30 as Whistleblower Appreciation Day, honoring people she fired! Including Marlon Ray.

On July 18, Marlon Ray, a DC Public School (DCPS) whistleblower, secured a Proclamation from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser designating July 30, 2023 as Whistleblower Appreciation Day.

The proclamation celebrates the origins of whistleblower law in the United States, commends whistleblowers who are often penalized for doing the right thing, and encourages D.C. government employees to know their rights to blow the whistle.

Ray’s case is a perfect example of why these efforts are so important. Fired alongside Ray was Carolyn Jackson-King, former principal of Lawrence E. Boone Elementary, who reported and protested the use of a teacher training program that discriminated against Black students. Ray and Principal Jackson-King, known to the community as “Dr. J-K,” had been highly respected administrators at Boone. Both are now suing DCPS for retaliation.

In 2017, DCPS contracted Relay Graduate School of Education to conduct staff training. Contrary to what the name implies, Relay is not in fact a graduate school. As Education historian Diane Ravitch explained, “[Relay] has no scholars, no researchers, no faculty other than charter teachers. It is a trade school for teaching tricks of test-taking and how to control black and brown children and teach them to obey orders without questioning.”

Relay supervised training and evaluation with 20 DCPS schools – mostly from schools in majority Black and low-income Wards 7 and 8. Jackson-King felt that Relay training contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline by militarizing schools and trying to strip educators and students of their agency.

“Kids have to sit a certain way, they have to look a certain way,” Jackson-King told NPR WAMU 88.5. “They cannot be who they are…Those are all the ways they teach you in prison — you have to walk in a straight line, hands behind your back, eyes forward…I just feel they attempted to control Black bodies.”

Another faculty member at Boone commented on the training asking, “Why should the Black and brown children be subjected to move a certain way or respond to certain commands? They’re not dogs. They’re kids.”

Early in the 2019-2020 school year, Jackson-King shared her concerns with Mary Ann Stinson, an instructional superintendent who began overseeing Boone in 2019. At the end of that year, Jackson-King received her lowest evaluation score in 30 years of teaching: a 2.75/4. She tried to appeal the score, but Stinson informed her that the score meant she would not be re-appointed as principal. She was fired.

Marlon Ray, a 20+ year DCPS employee and the former director of strategy and logistics at Boone, was one of the community members involved in protests after Jackson-King’s termination. He had also filed previous whistleblower complaints, including for the overpayment of Relay Training.

Ray was first retaliated against by Jackson-King’s replacement principal, who reprimanded him for participating in the peaceful protests. He became the only school employee required to work five full days a week in person at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. Ultimately, Ray was let go in 2021 after being told his position was terminated for budgetary reasons. However, DCPS made a job posting to fill the same position just two months later.

In February 2022, Ray and Jackson-King filed suit against DCPS and the District of Columbia, alleging that DCPS violated the Whistleblower Protection Act and the D.C. Human Rights Act. They seek reinstatement of their jobs.

Both Ray and Jackson-King are prime examples of whistleblowers who risked their jobs in order to do their job correctly. These local heroes stood up for students who were subject to unjust and racist education policy, and who may not have had the information or the power to stand up for themselves.

This makes Mayor Bowser’s recognition of Whistleblower Appreciation Day all the more meaningful. Siri Nelson, Executive Director of the National Whistleblower Center (NWC), who received the mayor’s proclamation alongside Mr. Ray said that “local whistleblowers are critical to increasing governmental recognition of Whistleblower Appreciation Day.”

NWC hopes that the day will help government agencies – local and federal – change the culture of whistleblowing. Whistleblowers support government agencies in accomplishing their mission more effectively and holding them accountable to their own policies. It is therefore vital that they are protected and celebrated.

“This proclamation is the second of its kind,” Nelson noted. “Marlon Ray follows Jackie Garrick who received a similar proclamation from Florida’s Escambia County in 2022. NWC advocates for the permanent federal recognition of National Whistleblower Day and these proclamations show that change is within reach. I thank Marlon for taking this incredible action and look forward to celebrating him and Muriel Bowser’s proclamation on July 27th.”

Marlon Ray will speak at NWC’s National Whistleblower Day event on Capitol Hill on July 27, 2023. Those wishing to attend the in-person event can RSVP here: https://www.whistleblowers.org/national-whistleblower-day

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Racism, Resistance

Texas A&M President Resigns After Failed Effort to Recruit an Esteemed Black Journalist

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2023 //
66

Kate McGee of The Texas Tribune reported on an academic mess in Texas that turned into a national scandal. Texas A&M, one of the state’s premier universities recruited veteran journalist Kathleen McElroy to serve as Dean of Journalism at A&M. Dr. McElroy was considered a prize catch after years of experience at the New York Times and her doctorate in journalism. In addition, she is a tenured professor at the University of Texas in Austin and a graduate of Texas A&M.

A&M wooed Dr. McElroy, offered her a position with tenure, and held a celebration when she accepted.

When Texas A&M University announced last month that it had hired a director to revive its journalism school, it included the kind of fanfare usually reserved for college coaches and athletes.

The university set up maroon, silver and white balloons around a table outside its Academic Building for an official signing ceremony. It was there that Kathleen O. McElroy, a respected journalist with a long career, officially accepted the position to run the new program and teach as a tenured professor, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

McElroy, a 1981 Texas A&M graduate, was the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism between 2016 and 2022, where she is a tenured professor. Earlier, she spent 20 years in various editing roles at The New York Times until heading to UT-Austin to pursue her doctorate.

But apparently some conservative members of the A&M board objected to Dr. McElroy’s concern for diversity and inclusion, as well as her career at the New York Times, and the offer was whittled down to a position without tenure. Dr. McElroy withdrew her acceptance, and in the ensuing publicity, the president of the multi-campus university resigned.

McGee wrote:

After a week of turmoil over the botched hiring of a Black journalist to revive the Texas A&M University journalism department, M. Katherine Banks has resigned as the university’s president.

Mark A. Welsh III, dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, will serve as acting president until the Board of Regents can meet to name an interim president. Texas A&M System Chancellor John Sharp has recommended they appoint Welsh as an interim until the board can do a national search for a new president. Banks’ resignation is effective immediately.

In a letter sent to A&M System Chancellor John Sharp Thursday evening, Banks wrote, “The recent challenges regarding Dr. [Kathleen] McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately. The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”

The fallout over McElroy’s hiring, which has garnered national media attention, marks the culmination of Banks’ two-year tenure, which was often met with pushback from faculty and students who consistently raised concerns with the direction she was taking the university and the way in which her administration was communicating its vision.

During that time, faculty leaders have passed resolutions calling for more involvement in university decisions, and research leaders on campus raised concerns with her administration’s decision-making. She was forced to walk back the decision to abruptly end the print publication of the university’s student newspaper, The Battalion, after students and alumni protested. Her administration also faced pushback from students after the school decided to cut funding and sponsorship of an annual campus drag show, known as Draggieland. Throughout all of that, Sharp has remained supportive of Banks’ leadership.

In response to the news, McElroy told the Tribune in a text message Friday evening: “I’m deeply grateful for the groundswell of support I’ve received, especially from Aggies of all majors, and my former and current students. There’s much more I could say and will say about what has unfolded. But for now, I’ll reserve those statements for a future date.”

The latest fracas on campus that led to Banks’ resignation comes after the university’s faculty senate passed a resolution Wednesday to create a fact-finding committee into the mishandling of the hiring of McElroy. During that meeting, Banks took responsibility for the flawed hiring process but told faculty members that she did not approve changes to an offer letter that led a prospective journalism professor to walk away from negotiations amid conservative backlash to her hiring.

However, Hart Blanton, the head of the university’s department of communications and journalism who was closely involved in McElroy’s recruiting, said in a statement Friday that Banks interfered with the hiring process early on and that race was a factor in university officials’ decision to water down the job offer…

McElroy, an experienced journalism professor currently working at the University of Texas at Austin who previously worked as an editor at The New York Times, turned down an offer to reboot A&M’s journalism program after a fraught negotiation process first reported by The Texas Tribune. What originally was a tenure-track offer was reduced to a five-year position, then to a one-year position from which she could be fired at any time.

“This offer letter … really makes it clear that they don’t want me there,” McElroy said last week about the one-year contract. “But in no shape, form or fashion would I give up a tenured position at UT for a one-year contract that emphasizes that you can be let go at any point.”

Initially, Texas A&M celebrated hiring McElroy with a public signing ceremony to announce her hiring. But in the weeks following, vocal groups from outside the university system expressed issues with her previous employment at The New York Times and her support for diversity in newsrooms. McElroy has said she was told that not everyone was pleased by her joining the faculty. Critics of her hiring focused on her prior work on diversity and inclusion.

McElroy said she was further told by José Luis Bermúdez, then interim dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences, that there was “noise in the [university] system” about her, though he did not give specifics. When she pressed him, she said he told her, “you’re a Black woman who worked at The New York Times.” He told her that in some conservative circles, The New York Times is akin to Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party in Russia that began in the early 1900s.

McElroy said that Bermúdez ultimately told her he could not protect her from university leaders facing pressure to fire her over “DEI hysteria” surrounding her appointment and advised McElroy to stay in her tenured role at UT-Austin.

Earlier this week, Bermúdez announced he would step down from his role as interim dean at the end of the month.

Categories Ethics, Failure, Higher Education, Race, Racism

John Thompson: Oklahoma Superintendent Contends that Tulsa Race Massacre Was Not About Race

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2023 //
332

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, describes how State Superintendent Ryan Walters tied himself up in verbal knots trying to explain why the Tulsa race massacre wasn’t about race or racism.

He writes:

I’ve been teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre, and discussing Critical Race Theory since the 1990s, but I finally learned the true facts about both, when “Oklahoma school officials announced plans Friday to begin teaching students that the Tulsa Race Massacre was a crime of passion that resulted from loving Black people too much.” The State Superintendent, Ryan Walters, explained:

It’s important that students are educated on how this horrifying event—which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the destruction of Black Wall Street—only happened because of how electric and wild the love was between white people and Black people at the time. … White people had been getting jealous because their African American counterparts were doing too well economically and couldn’t hang out as much as they used to. “We often end up hurting the people we love the most, and … Sometimes burning down more than 35 city blocks and 1,250 homes is the only way to express the fiery passion of your love for someone.”

Walters further explained that “the Tulsa Race Massacre had been left out of history books out of respect for Black people’s privacy.”

Okay, that was the narrative told by The Onion. But, still, it leaves open the question: which is crazier, The Onion’s satire or Superintendent Walters’ claims?

As KFOR T.V. and the Oklahoman reported, Walters spoke at Republican event at a library where “Silence!: Intense, heated moments” took over. He “was asked three times by someone in the crowd why the Tulsa Race Massacre doesn’t fall under his definition of Critical Race Theory (CRT).” The next day, Walters supposedly “walked back his statements. ‘I am referring to individuals who carried out the crime. They didn’t act that way because they were white, they acted that way because they were racist.’” And, as reported by The Frontier, Walters has also said,

“The media is twisting two separate answers. They misrepresented my statements about the Tulsa Race Massacre in an attempt to create a fake controversy.”

Reading the transcript of the meeting, it’s hard to understand Walters’ weird words, but it is impossible to deny he was saying contradictory things – that the Tulsa Massacre should be taught in school while also saying that the role of race, when it is mentioned in terms that he see as CRT ideology, is making whites feel bad about the history of violent racism, and that is banned by HB 1776.

Walters said:

Folks, I believe this is absolutely the greatest country in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. That doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes. … The only way our kids have the ability to learn from history and make this country continue to be the best country is to understand those times we fell short, a very clear, very direct understanding of those events.

Walters then may have tried to explain his understanding of the “mistakes” made during the Tulsa massacre where members of one race committed mass murder of persons of another race. But Walters’ words – that threaten schools and teachers – were incomprehensible. And as the Oklahoman noted, “Two Oklahoma school districts had their accreditation downgraded for touching on topics of race and privilege, and educators risk having their teaching license revoked.”

An audience member pushed further and asked, “How does the Tulsa Race Massacre not fall under your definition of CRT?” Walters then replied, “I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of your color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or in or are inherently racist. That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals.” But with critical race theory:

You’re saying that race defines a person. I reject that. So I would say you be judgmental of the issue, of the action, of the content of the character of the individual. Absolutely. But let’s not tie it to the skin color instead of the skin color determine it.

So an audience member then asked, “How does the Tulsa Race Massacre not fall under your definition of CRT?” Walters replied, “I answered it. That’s my answer. Again, I felt like…. (inaudible)”

So, what did Walters mean when he said the Tulsa Massacre and/or CRT should not be tied “to the skin color instead of the skin color determine it?”

The next day, after having the time to choose his words carefully, Walters said he wanted to be “crystal clear” that the “The Tulsa Race Massacre is a terrible mark on our history. The events on that day were racist, evil, and it is inexcusable.” But he didn’t seem to explain what could be taught about the “mistake,” the mass murder of around 300 Black people by a white mob, “Folks, I believe this is absolutely the greatest country in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. That doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes.”

Categories Bigotry, Failure, History, Oklahoma, Race, Racism

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

Georgia: Teacher May Be Fired for Teaching “Divisive Concept” about Gender

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2023 //
120

Like other Republican dominated states, Georgia passed copycat legislation banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” that might make some students feel uncomfortable or ashamed of something that happened long ago (like slavery, Jim Crow laws, peonage, segregation, etc., all of which is factual and true).

Despite the fact that the law was designed to deter teachers from accurately teaching about racism, a fifth-grade teacher is fighting for her job because she assigned a book about gender.

Anyone who wants to understand why teachers are leaving and teacher shortages are widespread should read this story.

At first glance, the plight of Katherine Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia, might seem confusing. Rinderle faces likely termination by the Cobb County School District for reading aloud a children’s book that touches on gender identity. Yet she is charged in part with violating policy related to a state law banning “divisive concepts” about race, not gender.

This disconnect captures something essential about state laws and directives restricting classroom discussion across the country: They seem to be imprecisely drafted to encourage censorship. That invites parents and administrators to seek to apply bans to teachers haphazardly, forcing teachers to err on the side of muzzling themselves rather than risk unintentionally crossing fuzzy lines into illegality.

“Teachers are fearful,” Rinderle told us in an interview. “These vague laws are chilling and result in teachers self-censoring.”

In short, when it comes to all these anti-woke laws and the MAGA-fied frenzy they’ve unleashed, the vagueness is the point.

As CNN reported, the district sent Rinderle a letter in May signaling its intent to fire her for a lesson using “My Shadow Is Purple.” The book is written from the perspective of a child who likes both traditionally “boy” things like trains and “girl” things like glitter. Its conclusion is essentially that sometimes blue and pink don’t really capture kids’ full interests and personalities — and that everyone is unique and should just be themselves.

The district’s letter, which we have obtained, criticized Rinderle for teaching the “controversial subject” of “gender identity” without giving parents a chance to opt out. She was charged with violating standards of professional ethics, safeguards for parents’ rights and a policy governing treatment of “controversial issues.”

But Rinderle and her lawyer, Craig Goodmark, argue that the policy on “controversial issues” is extremely hazy. They point out that it prohibits “espousing” political “beliefs” in keeping with a 2022 state law that bans efforts to persuade students to agree with certain “divisive concepts” that don’t reasonably apply here.

After all, in that law, those “divisive concepts” are all about race. Among them are the ideas that the United States is “fundamentally racist” and that people should feel “guilt” or bear “responsibility” for past actions on account of their race. It’s not clear how this policy applies to Rinderle’s alleged transgression.

What’s more, we have learned that this action was initiated by a parent’s troubling email to the district, provided to us by Rinderle and her lawyer, in which the parent notes that teachers were told to avoid “divisive” concepts. The parent then writes, “I would consider anything in the genre of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ divisive.”

Five years ago, this book would not have drawn attention. It is not advocating for LGBT OR queer behavior. Girls can be tomboys, boys can like to play with dolls without being gay.

But now an email from a single parent is enough to get a teacher fired.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Gender, Georgia, Racism

Jesse Hagopian: Visiting My Enslaved Ancestors’ Grave

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2023 //
12

Jesse Hagopian, a teacher-author-activist in Seattle, wrote this moving article in The Nation. He, his brother, and his father traveled to Morgantown, Mississippi, to visit the plantation where his ancestors were enslaved. The trip was delayed by the pandemic and illness. But when they arrived at last, they had an unforgettable experience.

Knowing that their trip occurred at the same time that many states were banning the teaching of the truth about slavery made them even more motivated to learn the truth and teach it.

Categories Education Reform, Mississippi, Racism

Jeannie Suk Gersen: Overturning Affirmative Action

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2023 //
91

Writing in The New Yorker, where she is a contributing columnist, Jeannie Suk Gersen analyzes the SCOTUS decision that ended affirmative action. Gersen is a Harvard Law School professor.

Gersen writes that the High Court forbade explicit consideration of race in evaluating candidates for admission, but it left a small opening:

Since universities can no longer consider applicants’ race in deciding whether to offer them admission, the immediate practical question is what information they can consider about applicants. In a key sentence, toward the end of his ruling, Roberts said, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” (Harvard cited the sentence in a message to its community after the Court’s decision.) Roberts’s point was that “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”

It remains to be seen whether colleges will find “race-neutral” ways of identifying students of color so they can maintain a diverse enrollment. One way is to de-emphasize standardized testing, which enlarges the pool of Black candidates.

Colleges and universities have long contended that demographic diversity is an important goal. The learning experience is enriched, they argued, when students come from different backgrounds and bring different perspectives.

But the goal of diversity was thrown out by the Roberts’ court. The six-justice majority ruled that diversity is no longer to be considered by courts to be “a compelling interest.”

She writes:

But even the liberal dissenters, in their strong defense of the need for race-conscious affirmative action, seemed not quite willing to tether their support of the policy to the goal of student-body diversity. That is because the dissenters, in two opinions, penned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were focussed on the continuing need to remedy the devastating, ongoing effects of the historical subjugation of Black Americans.

Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the affirmative-action precedents is that since 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court has said that the goal of remedying past societal discrimination and injustice is not a compelling interest for schools to pursue in admissions. The dissents in the S.F.F.A. cases underscored not only that the sins that the United States has visited on Black people did not end after slavery and Jim Crow but also that the original justification for affirmative action which the Court approved five decades ago—diversity—was entirely incommensurate to the profound problem to be addressed and was doomed to fail. ♦

Suppose the goal of affirmative action was to fast track large numbers of students from historically disadvantaged groups into the professions and the upper ranks of the business and corporate world. On that ground, it’s clear that affirmative action has been a remarkable success. It has propelled many hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of men and women into medicine, law, education, social work, and every other field.

But the problem that affirmative action was created to solve is very far from solved. Despite the strides that have been made, Blacks, Hispanics, people from Indigenous groups are still very far from equality. They continue to suffer from the historic injuries of the past.

I wonder: if the lawyers for the universities had justified affirmative action not on the value of diversity but on the basis of righting historic wrongs, would the Court have ruled differently? I don’t think so. The six hard-right Justices are on a mission to roll back civil rights law, to curb the power of government to right wrongs, and you encourage the emergence of a society in which people pull themselves up by their bootstraps without relying on government.

We know the problems with the bootstrap theory of progress. In a world where there is so much inequality, some people don’t need to pull themselves up. They are already on top. Others, those on the bottom, may not have any bootstraps at all. Rugged individualism will not reduce social and economic inequality.

Sadly, we can no longer look to the Supreme Court to protect either precedents or rights. Instead, we must tremble for our future whenever they announce a new decision.

The only hope for our democracy is an electoral sweep that makes possible an FDR or an LBJ.

It’s not likely to happen in 2024, given Trump’s loyal base, but I believe our survival as a democracy depends on re-electing Biden. Neither Trump nor DeSantis is qualified for the Presidency. The American renaissance is likely to happen when enough citizens realize that the Republican Party is no longer interested in protecting the Constitution and the rule of law. Will that be after Trump leaves politics? Will it be 2028? 2032?

Liz Cheney said recently that the biggest problem in our politics is that the people keep electing “idiots.” We will have our Renaissance when voters realize that governing requires reason and intelligence. That would mean a blue wave to sweep the idiots out of office.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Higher Education, Justice, Race, Racism

Heather Cox Richardson: The Supreme Court Is Putting Our Democracy at Risk

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2023 //
87

This is one of the best letters that Heather Cox Richardson has written since I started reading her posts. It puts the current Supreme Court’s radical decisions into historical perspective. This Court, hand-picked by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, is engaged in a shameless effort to move the clock back to the world as it existed before the New Deal. This Court threatens our democracy and our rights.

She writes:

Today the Supreme Court followed up on yesterday’s decision gutting affirmative action with three decisions that will continue to push the United States back to the era before the New Deal.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the court said that the First Amendment protects website designer Lorie Smith from having to use words she doesn’t believe in support of gay marriage. To get there, the court focused on the marriage website designer’s contention that while she is willing to work with LGBTQ customers, she doesn’t want to use her own words on a personalized website to celebrate gay marriages. Because of that unwillingness, she said, she wants to post on her website that she will not make websites for same-sex weddings. She says she is afraid that in doing so, she will run afoul of Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, which prevent public businesses from discriminating against certain groups of people.

This whole scenario of being is prospective, by the way: her online business did not exist and no one had complained about it. Smith claims she wants to start the business because “God is calling her ‘to explain His true story about marriage.’” She alleges that in 2016, a gay man approached her to make a website for his upcoming wedding, but yesterday, Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic reported that, while the man allegedly behind the email does exist, he is an established designer himself (so why would he hire someone who was not?), is not gay, and married his wife 15 years ago. He says he never wrote to Smith, and the stamp on court filings shows she received it the day after she filed the suit.

Despite this history, by a 6–3 vote, the court said that Smith was being hurt by the state law and thus had standing to sue. It decided that requiring the designer to use her own words to support gay marriage violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Taken together with yesterday’s decision ruling that universities cannot consider race as a category in student admissions, the Supreme Court has highlighted a central contradiction in its interpretation of government power: if the Fourteenth Amendment limits the federal government to making sure that there is no discrimination in the United States on the basis of race—the so-called “colorblind” Constitution—as the right-wing justices argued yesterday, it is up to the states to make sure that state laws don’t discriminate against minorities. But that requires either protecting voting rights or accepting minority rule.

This problem has been with us since before the Civil War, when lawmakers in the southern states defended their enslavement of their Black (and Indigenous) neighbors by arguing that true democracy was up to the voters and that those voters had chosen to support enslavement. After the Civil War, most lawmakers didn’t worry too much about states reimposing discriminatory laws because they included Black men as voters first in 1867 with the Military Reconstruction Act and then in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and they believed such political power would enable Black men to shape the laws under which they lived.

But in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that it was legal to cut citizens out of the vote so long as the criteria were not about race. States excluded women, who brought the case, and southern states promptly excluded Black men through literacy clauses, poll taxes, and so on. Northern states mirrored southern laws with their own, designed to keep immigrants from exercising a voice in state governments. At the same time, southern states protected white men from the effects of these exclusionary laws with so-called grandfather clauses, which said a man could vote so long as his grandfather had been eligible.

It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder.

Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.”

In the 1930s the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt undermined this coalition by using the federal government to regulate business and provide a social safety net. In the 1940s and 1950s, as racial and gender atrocities began to highlight in popular media just how discriminatory state laws really were, the Supreme Court went further, recognizing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration that states could not deprive any person of the equal protection of the laws meant that the federal government must protect the rights of minorities when states would not. Those rules created modern America.

This is what the radical right seeks to overturn. Yesterday the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment could not address racial disparities, but today, like lawmakers in the 1870s, it signaled that it would not protect voting in the states either. It rejected a petition for a review of Mississippi’s strict provision for taking the vote away from felons. That law illustrates just how fully we’re reliving our history: it dates from the 1890 Mississippi constitution that cemented power in white hands. Black Mississippians are currently 2.7 times more likely than white Mississippians to lose the right to vote under the law.

The court went even further today than allowing states to choose their voters. It said that even if state voters do call for minority protections, as Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws do, states cannot protect minorities in the face of someone’s religious beliefs. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that for “the first time in its history,” the court has granted “a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

It is worth noting that segregation was defended as a deeply held religious belief.

Today, using a case concerning school loans, the Supreme Court also took aim at the power of the federal government to regulate business. In Biden v. Nebraska the court declared by a vote of 6 to 3 that President Biden’s loan forgiveness program, which offered to forgive up to $20,000 of federally held student debt, was unconstitutional. The right-wing majority of the court argued that Congress had not intended to give that much power to the executive branch, although the forgiveness plan was based on law that gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs…as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a…national emergency…to ensure” that “recipients of student financial assistance…are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of [the national emergency]”.

The right-wing majority based its decision on the so-called major questions doctrine, invented to claw back regulatory power from the federal government. By saying that Congress cannot delegate significant decisions to federal agencies, which are in the executive branch, the court takes on itself the power to decide what a “significant” decision is. The court established this new doctrine in the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agencycase, stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate certain kinds of air pollution.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” constitutional analyst Ian Millhiser wrote today in Vox, today’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska “is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as ‘major questions’ which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.”

Today’s Supreme Court, packed as it has been by right-wing money behind the Federalist Society and that society’s leader, Leonard Leo, is taking upon itself power over the federal government and the state governments to recreate the world that existed before the New Deal.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called out the lurch toward turning the government over to the wealthy, supported as it is by religious footsoldiers like Lorie Smith: “Today, the court substituted itself for Congress,” Cardona told reporters. “It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents. They had no problem handing trillion-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super wealthy.”

Cardona made his point personal: “And many had no problems accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans, like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven. He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today. Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven. He represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven. She represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.”

In the majority opinion of Biden v. Nebraska, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that those who dislike the court’s decisions have accused the court of “going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” He defended the court’s decision and urged those who disagreed with it not to disparage the court because “such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.” But what is at stake is not simply these individual decisions, whether or not you agree with them; at stake is the way our democracy operates.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute didn’t offer much hope for Roberts’s plea. “It is not just the rulings the Roberts Court is making,” he tweeted. “They created out of [w]hole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

In a shot across the bow of this radical court, in her dissent to Biden v. Nebraska, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

—

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Billionaires, Cardona, Miguel, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Gender, Higher Education, History, Inequity, Injustice, Justice, Race, Racism, Religion, Shame, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »