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John Thompson: Reading a Classic About the Tulsa Race Massacre

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2024 //
5

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about a book that is important in Oklahoma history and American history.

He writes:

When I first read Victor Luckerson’s Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street, I was stunned by his beautiful prose. Watching Luckerson on CSPAN Book T.V., I was reminded of his eloquence. And I was even more impressed by the timeliness of the story of the communities and families who built and rebuilt Greenwood after the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, and who then had to repeatedly fight to keep their community from being erased. 

This April 2, 2024, when hearing a lawsuit on reparations, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Yvonne Kauger said to the litigants, “When I went to high school, … Greenwood was never mentioned,” so “I think regardless of what happens, you’re all to be commended for making sure that that will never happen again. It will be in the history books.”  We all must also commend Luckerson’s contribution to that essential story, and help pass it down to younger generations.

As Marcia Chatelain’s New York Times review of Built from the Fire explained, “The seemingly unfettered opportunity in the new state of Oklahoma drew unabashed capitalists, confidence men, industrious wives and loyal mothers to what had formerly been known as Indian Territory…” The story of diverse Black people who built Greenwood, the “Eden of the West” is just as complex.

Similarly, Suzette Malveaux’s Washington Post review started with the lie that prompted the Massacre by claiming:

Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, had sexually assaulted a white woman in an elevator. A show of force by Greenwood men to prevent Rowland from being lynched escalated into an all-out attack on Black Tulsans by white vigilantes, who in some cases had been handed arms by the police. As Luckerson recounts, “More than 1,200 houses were leveled, nearly every business was burned to the ground and an unknown number of people — estimates reach as high as 300 — were killed.”

As one white person recalled, white officers quickly deputized the crowd; he was told, “Get a gun and get busy, and try to get a n—–.”

But Malveaux also stresses the way that:

Luckerson shines a light on uncomfortable fissures between Oklahoma’s Black freedmen and Black migrants from the South; Native American enslavers and Black enslaved people; and the American Red Cross’s White “angels of mercy” and Tulsa’s mobsters. And he doesn’t shy away from telling the full story of Greenwood’s great leaders.

For instance, one of the fathers of Greenwood’s economic and cultural strength was J.H. Goodwin, a former railroad brakeman, who leveraged his position with the railroad (which was rare for a Black man at the time) and who was able to work with all types of people, but who passed down psychological burdens, as well as resilience to his family. His family invested in journalism, said one of their readers, so “you can have free speech and have privilege to act as a man without being molested.”

Goodwin’s stories, and those of other families in the book, include experiences gained and brought back from Fiske University, Chicago, Washington D.C., and elsewhere. The family became best known for the Oklahoma Eagle newspaper, which shared diverse perspectives and kept up the fight for justice. They also played leadership roles in desegregating Tulsa schools. And like so many Black Tulsans, in doing so, they drew on both “Booker T. Washington’s model of economic power and W.E.B. DuBois’s model of political power.”

Goodwin’s most influential recent descendent, Sen. Regina Goodwin, kicked off her political career in 2015 with the words, “Some women get lost in the fire and some … are built from the fire.”  

Luckerson explained that “residents of Greenwood bore the burden of living in two Americas at once, the idealized version imagined in the minds of white slaveholders in 1776, and the more brutal reality that black Tulsans and their ancestors bore witness to.” He balances tales of graft by both Black and much worse White entrepreneurs. Although W.E.B. DuBois correctly described the resulting community as “impudent and noisy,” those same businessmen “opposed economic injustice just as fiercely as they fought segregation.”

Immediately after the massacre, Tulsa officials used zoning ordinances to keep Black residents from rebuilding. The insurance claims of Black residents were rejected. New segregation laws were passed, and bankers used “red lining” to deny new loans to Blacks. Moreover, criminal courts failed to find whites guilty of assault, arson and murder. However, Luckerson also chronicled skillful but often unsuccessful legal battles by attorneys like B.C. Franklin.

Over the next decade, Black resilience got the business community back on track. The gains were first undermined by the Great Depression, and then recovered as WWII approached. The Roosevelt administration implemented successful economic stimulus programs, as well discriminatory and counter-productive efforts. The same occurred during the war when Greenwood leaders had some successes in creating economic opportunities with the help of the federal government, while other wartime and post-war investments were too discriminatory to be constructive. Efforts to rebuild Greenwood’s neighborhoods sometimes prompted violence like a KKK cross burning and the dynamiting of a Black family’s home.

Luckerson then describes the 1950s and 1960s when legal battles and grassroots organizing created successes, as well as mixed feelings. For instance, Greenwood’s local political efforts resulted in funding Black schools like Booker T. Washington high school. (Don Ross, a teenager who would become an influential state legislator, was a leader in the fight for educational opportunities.) Thurgood Marshall’s anti-segregation efforts contributed to his historic Brown v Board of Education victory. But some Greenwood residents mourned the loss of Booker T. Washington, saying it “ripped the heart out of a community that had once had the pride to succeed in all parts of life.”

There was unanimity, however, in rejecting the way that highway construction and Urban Renewal once again devastated Greenwood.

Luckerson then brings the narrative through tragedy to sometimes promising political efforts and the often successful, but sometimes divisive efforts to build a dynamic 21st century Greenwood. One of the leaders was Tiffany Crutcher, whose unarmed brother, Terence, was shot to death in the middle of the street by police officer. Moreover, Rep. Bob Ross and Rep. Regina Goodwin worked skillfully within the legislative system to fund studies of the 1921 Massacre and reparations. Sadly, white political leaders, who had sounded so supportive of such efforts, largely failed to follow through.

Fortunately, the HBO film, The Watchmen, brought the Massacre to the attention of millions of Americans. And the George Kaiser Family Foundation established the Greenwood Cultural Foundation.  Luckerson also provides an objective account of the fight over today’s reparations lawsuit. 

The Greenwood revival also led to President Joe Biden’s commemoration of the Massacre. Speaking in Greenwood, he didn’t use the word “reparations,” but he “discussed the devastating effect of urban renewal on Greenwood. ‘A highway was built right through the heart of the community … cutting off black families and businesses from jobs and opportunity.’” The President then “announced plans to increase federal contracts for minority-owned businesses and try to curb racist housing appraisals.”

Luckerson concludes with the words of B.C. Franklin, “Right is slow and tardy while wrong is aggressive.” He then adds, “For more than a century, Greenwood has been grappling with wrong in all its combative forms. Wickedness flamed white-hot in 1921, but the embers continued to burn long after.” This stretched “from relief aid being withheld during the Great Depression … [to] Urban Planning brochures featuring smiling black faces and words laden with double meaning – blight, renewal, progress.” He later makes one prediction, “Whether or not Tulsa does right by the people of Greenwood and North Tulsa, they will continue to do what they’ve always done: build.”

Given the pressure by State Superintendent Ryan Walters to censor books that he believes would wrongly make White kids feel uneasy, I understand why teachers would feel afraid to teach Lukerson’s book. But we owe it to students to make his masterpiece available to all.

Categories History, Literature, Oklahoma, Racism

SAVE THE DATE: The Ravitch Lecture at Wellesley Is April 18, This Thursday!

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
12

All are welcome to a very important lecture at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Admission is free. Join me!

The speaker is a pioneer of critical race theory.

Professor Soo Hong, chair of the Education Department at Wellesley, released the following announcement.

We are thrilled to announce that our 2024 Ravitch Lecture in Education will be presented by Professor Patricia Williams ’72, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. Professor Williams’s talk is titled, “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History.”

This is a topic that feels relevant now more than ever. 

The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 18, 4:30 PM in Jewett Auditorium. Please share the details of this event widely!

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Description of “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History” 
We live in an oddly contradictory moment: politicians who position themselves as supporters of “absolute” freedom of speech simultaneously enact laws that restrict access to books about race, gender, or critical theory, and seek to constrain conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There have always been “culture wars” in America—it is not surprising that conversations about traumatic histories and contested historical perspectives might be fractious. In a civil society, we commit to arguing our way to consensus, however noisily or uncomfortably, and even if it takes generations. But it is the mark of an uncivil—or authoritarian—society when we find ourselves without the right to speak, hear, write, publish, dissent, or share common space even in our disagreement. The First Amendment rightly allows us to curtail speech that poses an “imminent threat of physical harm.” But recent “anti-woke” laws banish from public spaces books and ideas that merely might inspire “shame,” “guilt,” or “discomfort.” This lecture will ponder the conceptual chasm between those two notions of constraint upon speech. What power imbalance, what uses of force are rationalized in erasing whole histories from collective contemplation? What civic dispossession is enacted when certain lives or lived narratives are discounted as intolerable, unknowable–whose mere recounting is silenced as illegal?

Wellesley Logo

Soo Hong

The lecture will be taped and available online at a later time.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Racism

Bob Shepherd: A Review of a Review of “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
16

Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.

As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.

America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.

Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.

Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.

But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.

I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.

So I happily post Bob Shepherd’s review of the review here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DFER, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, History, Hoax, Lies, Network for Public Education, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Unions, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

D.C.: Anna J. Cooper, a Hero of American Education

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2024 //
3

Shirley Moody-Turner wrote in the Washington post about a forgotten hero of American education: Dr. Anna J. Cooper. Cooper was the principal of the M Street School in the District of Columbia, one of the most successful schools in the city. She insisted on a demanding academic curriculum for her Black students. Despite the school’s success, she was removed on trumped-up charges. The Black community fought back but lost. The M Street School eventually became the celebrated Dunbar High School.

Moody-Turner begins:

In January 1902, Anna Julia Cooper, one of the most highly educated Black women in the country, was appointed the seventh principal of Northwest D.C.’s famed M Street High School, the first and most prestigious public high school for Black education. Black people from around the country aspired to send their children to M Street, and its roster of teachers and graduates read like a Who’s Who of Washington’s Black educational and cultural elite. Under Cooper’s leadership, M Street students won scholarships and gained admissions to top colleges and universities — including Harvard, Brown, Yale and Dartmouth.

But just four years into her tenure, days before the start of a new school year, the White director of Washington high schools convinced the D.C. Board of Education not to reappoint M Street’s acclaimed principal. When Cooper arrived for the first day of school, the school janitor barred Cooper from entering the building. Police officers observed from across the street. They were ordered to arrest Cooper if they deemed she was creating a disturbance. With her students watching from the windows, Cooper — always a model of dignity and decorum — exited the school grounds.

Cooper’s story, now largely forgotten, was part of a wider movement to control the direction of Black public education in the early 20th century. Then, like now, battles over education — and especially the question of who was permitted to lead elite institutions, training the next generation to excel — were proxies in the larger culture wars. Today, with female and minority leaders of universities facing resistance from people who assume they have not earned the right to hold their positions, Cooper’s story is an illuminating one. What happened to her illustrates not only how the tactics around removing such leaders have persisted for more than a century, but also what was at stake — and still is — in the battles over educational access and leadership.

Born enslaved in Raleigh, N.C., in 1858, Cooper began her fight for an equal education early in life. As a student at St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, she successfully petitioned for the right to take what were designated as “boys” classes, including courses in Greek, Latin, French, science and math. She went on to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she again protested for access to the full curriculum. She graduated Oberlin with a BA and MA in mathematics and began writing, teaching and lecturing around the country on Black civil rights and gender equality. In 1892, she published a book called “A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South,” arguing for Black women’s unique role in the struggles for racial and gender equality, which garnered international acclaim.


In 1887, Cooper was recruited to join the faculty at the famed M Street High School. She taught there for 14 years and served one year as vice principal before agreeing to serve as the school’s principal. She did so, however, at precisely the moment when the sovereignty of Black public schools — M Street, in particular — was under attack.

For decades, the public school system in D.C. was looked to as a shining example of what was possible for Black education. Since 1868, M Street had operated under a Black superintendent, and through a combination of Black political influence, community support, committed teachers and congressional appropriations, the Black community managed to secure the resources and maintain relative autonomy to create a model public school system for Black students in the District.

By the end of the 19th century, however, with the backlash over Reconstruction gains in Black civil and political rights and the national ascendancy of Jim Crow segregation, Black control over Black schools came under attack. In 1900, Congress restructured school oversight in the District so that the Black superintendent — now reassigned to be an assistant superintendent — no longer oversaw M Street High School directly, instead placing it under the supervision of the White director of public high schools, Percy M. Hughes. As Hughes took his post, Cooper took hers.

Hughes was determined to remove her, and he did. He wanted to impose a “colored curriculum” on the school but she insisted on a college prep curriculum. As the author put it, Cooper was “punished for leading.” After she left, she earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne. She later returned to the M Street School as a teacher for another 20 years.

Open the link and read the rest of the story.

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, History, Race, Racism, Resistance

North Carolina: Court of Appeals Rejects Removal of Confederate Monument

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2024 //
32

The North Carolina NAACP petitioned the state courts to remove a Confederate statue from the front of the Alamance County courthouse.

The News & Observer reported:

An appeals court has rejected the NAACP’s arguments for removing the Confederate monument standing outside the Alamance County courthouse, citing state law that prohibits its removal.

Both the state and Alamance branches of the civil rights group filed suit in 2021, arguing that the 30-foot rebel soldier’s statue is an enduring symbol of white supremacy and should be relocated to a “historically appropriate location.”

The suit followed a nationwide string of protests that saw Confederate statues pulled down in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, along with numerous Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Graham, including one in 2020 that saw demonstrators pepper-sprayed during a march to the polls.

In their lawsuit, lawyers for the NAACP argued that the monument in Graham violates the state Constitution by ”maintaining and protecting a symbol of white supremacy in front of an active courthouse.”

They further argued that Alamance officials kept the statue in its place out of a spirit of discrimination, which would violate the state’s equal-protection clause.

But the court brushed these arguments aside by invoking the Monuments Protection Law passed by the General Assembly in 2015.

“The record conclusively shows that the Monument is a monument located on public property which commemorates military service that is part of North Carolina’s history,” read the N.C. Appeals Court’s decision. “In so concluding, we note our federal government recognizes that service in the Confederate Army qualifies as “military service. … We conclude that, under the Monument Protection Law, (Alamance County and its commissioners) lack authority to remove the Monument.”

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/article286861880.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Bigotry, History, North Carolina, Racism

Florida: Circuit Court Overturns “Stop Woke” Law in Workplaces

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
1

At DeSantis’s urging, the Florida legislature passed a law known as “Stop Woke.” The law restricts teaching about race and gender in the state’s classrooms and bans “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the workplace. Several employers sued to block the law, calling it a restriction on free speech. The employers won in the federal District Court, and the state appealed the decision. Today the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Stop Woke Act as applied to employers. It remains in effect for schools.

The Orlando Sentinel reported:

TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court Monday rejected restrictions that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers placed on race-related issues in workplace training, part of a 2022 law that DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act.”


A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the restrictions violated First Amendment rights.


“This is not the first era in which Americans have held widely divergent views on important areas of morality, ethics, law and public policy,” the 22-page opinion said. “And it is not the first time that these disagreements have seemed so important, and their airing so dangerous, that something had to be done. But now, as before, the First Amendment keeps the government from putting its thumb on the scale.”


The panel upheld a preliminary injunction issued in 2022 by Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker of Tallahassee against the restrictions. The law was challenged by Primo Tampa, LLC, a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream franchisee; Honeyfund.com, Inc., a Clearwater-based technology company that provides wedding registries; and Chevara Orrin and her company, Collective Concepts, LLC.

Orrin and her company provide consulting and training to employers about issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion.


Walker also separately issued a preliminary injunction against part of the law that would restrict the teaching of race-related concepts in universities. The state has appealed that decision.


The workplace-training part of the law listed eight race-related concepts and said that a required training program or other activity that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual (an employee) to believe any of the following concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”


As an example, the law targeted compelling employees to believe that an “individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”

The state disputed that the law violated speech rights, saying that it regulated “conduct.” It said businesses could still address the targeted concepts in workplace training but couldn’t force employees to take part.


But the appeals court flatly rejected such arguments Monday. It described the law as the “latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Disruption, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Racism

CNN: “Moms for Liberty” Is Encountering Stiff Resistance

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2024 //
69

When an education story is featured by a major media outlet like CNN, you can bet it’s captured mainstream attention.

Many educators have worried about the pernicious agenda of “Moms for Liberty,” which arrived on the scene in 2021 with a sizable war chest.

What is that agenda? Defaming public schools and their teachers. Accusing them of being “woke “ and indoctrinating students to accept left wing ideas about race and gender. Banning books they don’t like. Talking about “parental rights,” but only for straight white parents who share their values.

M4L got started in Florida, as do many wacky and bigoted rightwing campaigns, but it has been shamed recently by the sex scandal involving one of its co-founders, Brigitte Ziegler. The two other co-founders dropped her name from their website, but the stain persists.

CNN reports that this rightwing group is encountering stiff opposition from parents who don’t share their agenda and who don’t approve of book banning.

The story begins:

Viera, FloridaCNN —

In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.

A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.

Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.

RELATED ARTICLEOusted Florida GOP leader Christian Ziegler won’t be charged with sexual battery

“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”

“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Media, Parent Groups, Privatization, Racism

Watch Ruby Bridges on the Stephen Colbert Show

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2024 //
14

Ruby Bridges was chosen as the first child to integrate a public school in New Orleans. Six years old, she walked to school surrounded by federal marshals. After Norman Rockwell illustrated the photo, it became an iconic image as “The Problem We All Live With.”

Ruby Bridges was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, and it was a moving interview. He asked her if she was afraid when she saw the crowds of screaming white parents outside the school. She said, “No, I thought it was a Mardi Gras event.” When she entered the school, the crowd rushed in and withdrew their children, leaving her the only student in the school.

It’s a wonderful short interview, and she is a very impressive woman.

Categories Censorship, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Libraries, New Orleans, Racism, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

“Democracy“: A Yale Historian Speaks Out About the Changes in the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2024 //
81

A new commenter on the blog ssserted recently that real scholars don’t express their views about current events. Our reader “Democracy” here excerpts a recent article by a genuine scholar, David Blight of Yale University. Professor Blight is an eminent scholar of African American history, who recently edited a volume of Frederick Douglass’s writings for the Library of America. The following excerpt cited was published in the New York Review of Books.

Incidentally, the Washington Post reported that Trump responded to Nikki Haley’s concern about his age by saying that he took a mental test of 35-40 questions where he was shown a picture of a giraffe, a tiger, whale, and he correctly identified the whale. It sounds like a test for little children or non-English speakers.

Democracy wrote to the blog:

David Blight, historian from Yale, recently called Trump woefully “ignorant” about history, and, in essence a liar.

But Trump IS the current Republican Party, and here’s Blight on that:

“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.”

“This new Confederacy is regional and rural. It knows what it hates: the two coasts, diverse cities, marriage equality, certain kinds of feminism, political correctness, university ‘elites,’ and ‘liberals’ generally. It is racial and undemocratic. It twists American history to its own ends, substituting ‘patriotism’ for scholarship and science. It has weaponized ‘truth’ and rendered it oddly irrelevant. It has brought us almost to a new 1860, an election in which Americans voted for fundamentally different visions of a proslavery or an antislavery future.”

Republicans: The New Confederacy

You can see all of this in Trump’s words and actions, and it’s parroted in turn by his minions, and his supporters, and by his lawyers.

Trump has proved himself to be a serial liar, racist, misogynist, and seditious traitor to the Constitution and the republic. The Republican Party is his enabler.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Ignorance, Racism, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Why Rightwingers Oppose Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2024 //
23

Thom Hartmann continues to amaze me, with his steady production of powerful articles. This one is especially important for the readers of this blog, whose primary purpose is to strengthen and protect our public schools.

Thom Hartmann writes:

In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).

From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s advocacy of public schools in the late 19th century, right up until 1954, this was an uncontroversial position. It’s why every developed country on Earth has a vibrant public school system and — with the exception of the US since Reagan ended free college in California — most developed countries offer free or near-free college to their citizens.

But in 1954, the US Supreme Court upset the education apple cart by declaring in their Brown v Board case that “separate but equal” schools, segregated by race, were anything but “equal.” That decision fueled two movements that live on to this day.

The first was the rightwing anti-communist movement spearheaded by the John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. They put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and “Impeach Earl Warren,” who was then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for requiring “communist” racial integration of our schools.

The second was the private, all-white “academy” movement that has morphed over the years into charter schools and the “school choice” movement of today. It received a major boost when the white supremacist co-founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, published a widely-read and influential article in 1955explicitly calling for what he called “education vouchers” to fund all-white private schools to “solve the national crisis” the Court had created.

In 1958 when the Virginia Supreme Court went along with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision and ordered that state’s schools desegregated, the governor shut downevery public school in the state. Prince Edward County’s schools were still closed in 1964, when they were finally ordered to open by the courts.

Hundreds of “segregation academies” opened across the South; in Mississippi, for example, 41,000 white students left public schools to attend these academies in just the one year of 1969. Parents had to pay the tuition themselves, but they were willing to do so to avoid their children having to interact with Black, Hispanic, or Asian kids.

The turning point for the Republican Party was 1964, when President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed and signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, one Southern Democratic politician after another changed party affiliation to the GOP so they could continue to argue against “forced integration” of public schools.

The Republican war on public schools burst into the open with the Reagan Revolution, when Education Secretary Bill Bennett oversaw a 30 percent cut in federal aid to public schools following Reagan’s promise to abolish the Department altogether. Every Republican running for president since has made a similar promise or claimed the need to end the Education Department.

Bill Bennett wasn’t shy about explaining why it was necessary to gut public schools, after the Supreme Court had ordered they must be racially integrated. Bennett wanted to privatize public education — as did Trump’s former Education Secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos — and is probably most famous for his statement that gives us a clue as to why this idea of ending public education is so persistent in the GOP:

“If you wanted to reduce crime,” Bennett said on the radio, “you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

LISTEN NOW · 0:17

Could it be that it’s all about keeping white children away from Bennett’s Black babies? Is simple racism what’s animating the GOP’s antipathy toward public education?

One clue is that the idea of ending public education in America goes back even farther than Bennett or Reagan to a single moment and a single court decision. 

When I was born, in 1951, Republicans loved public schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to build gleaming new public schools all across the United States: I attended one, as did perhaps a majority of my generation.

But then came the Supreme Court, with their Brown v Board decision.

In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools desegregated. The “Little Rock Nine” — nine Black children trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School — became nationally famous when Governor Orval Faubus prevented them from entering the school that fall, provoking Eisenhower to call up federal troops to escort the children to class.

Faubus called a referendum — an election — and the good citizens of Little Rock voted 19,470 to 7,561 to shut down their entire school system rather than comply with Eisenhower’s order. That, in turn, led back to the Supreme Court, which, in the fall of 1958, ruled unanimously in Cooper v Aaron that the Brown v Board desegregation order was, in fact, now the law of the land for public education.

In response, whites-only private schools and “academies” began springing up across the nation, many run by all-white churches. (Jerry Falwell tried, in 1966, to open an all-white school; in 1980 he became Reagan’s main advisor on merging the white supremacist faction of evangelical Christians — also triggered by Brown v Board — into the GOP.)

Thus, in 1958 the governor of Virginia closed all the public schools in racially mixed Warren County, Norfolk, and Charlottesville; Prince Edward County’s public schools remained closed for a full five years.

While that’s the foundational history of what has become the GOP’s war on public education, for most of the past 40 years Republicans have merely claimed vague libertarian principles when they try to explain what they ironically call “school choice.”

It wasn’t until Donald Trump gave them permission — and showed them how politically potent it could be — to unleash their inner racists that the GOP went public with overt white supremacy as a core value for the party.

While Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a little-known 1993 analysis of structural racism pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell taught only in law school, rightwing influencer Christopher Rufo popularized the term with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show.

From there, it echoed around the GOP for a few months before catching fire across rightwing hate radio, podcasts, and Fox. Pretty soon white supremacist militia members were showing up at school board meetings threatening members that “we know where you live.”

Republicans anxious to stoke the fears of their white racist base began inveighing against teaching CRT in public schools — even though such a thing had never happened — and passing laws so loosely worded as to bar any meaningful teaching or classroom discussion of America’s racial history.

All-white private schools funded with taxpayer dollars have become the darlings of Republicans. In most cases these schools don’t need to flout the law by declaring their segregated status: Black, Asian, and Hispanic parents most often simply aren’t interested in enrolling their children in schools that proudly proclaim they will not allow a drop of “CRT,” true American history, or real science education in their classrooms.

The issue of privatizing public schools came up in Arizona in 2018 with a statewide ballot initiative that would extend free school vouchers to every student in the state: it was defeated by voters by a 2:1 ratio. Writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts was unambiguous in her description of the state’s voters’ horror at the ballot initiative:

“Actually, they didn’t just reject it. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”

Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered state, though, didn’t much care about the will of the voters. Appealing exclusively to their white racist “Christian” base, they pushed what was essentially that same proposal through the GOP-controlled state legislature and it was signed into law last year by Republican then-Governor Doug Doocey.

In giving every student in the state the ability to opt out of public education with a taxpayer-funded voucher, Doocey established a new benchmark in the war against racially integrated public schools that was matched this year by Florida, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah.

Legislation to gut public schools and replace them with vouchers for private schools have failed in six states so far (Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota), but Republicans are not letting go. This year voucher bills were introduced in at least 24 states.

The fact that most of the nation’s public school teachers are union members has given Republicans another good reason, in their minds, to do everything possible to destroy public schools. As Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimedlast year, in the minds of Republicans the American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten is “the most dangerous person in the world.”

Republicans also love the fact that voucher programs mostly subsidize upper-income families, while educationally ghettoizing the children of low-income parents. Vouchers almost never cover all the costs of attending a private school, so they primarily serve as a government handout to the mostly upper-middle-class white families who already wanted to send their kids to today’s version of the segregation academies.

Once the public schools are largely dead, Republicans will begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place.

For the moment, though, private schools are a booming industry as a result of the GOP’s embrace of Friedman’s vouchers. In Florida, for example, they have virtually no rules or standards for the over-one-billion-dollars the state shovels into its private schools: while public schools must disclose their graduation rates, how they spend their money, and let anybody examine their curriculum, private academies have no such rules in many Republican-controlled states, even though they’re receiving public monies.

Many private schools across the country operate with untrained and uncertified “teachers,” have no clear standards for graduation, and refuse to teach “controversial” subjects like evolution, climate science, and the racial history of America.

Which brings us to organized religion, the other recipient of big bucks because of the school voucher movement. Schools affiliated with churches are now raking in billions every month across the US, and Republicans — who continue to push for unconstitutional things like mandatory public school prayer — pander daily to fundamentalists who don’t want their kids exposed to science or history.

Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized this practice of shoveling taxpayer funds to churches and religious schools in their notorious Carson v Makin decision last year. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:

[In just five short years this Court has] “shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.” This decison “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

Which is exactly what the GOP wants. As SenDem recently wrote for Daily Kos:

“Laura Ingraham claimed that ‘a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.’ Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are ‘a destructive system’ and described teachers as ‘KKK with summers off.’

“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has called public schools ‘a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.’ Donald Trump declared, ‘public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs.’ And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called them taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that need to end, which is a bit ironic since she is the poster child for the necessity of funding public education.”

Sweden has been flirting with libertarianism for a few decades and was the first developed country to offer American-style school vouchers to all kids so they could attend private, for-profit public schools. Just a month ago, their government proclaimed the experiment a disaster and is trying to figure out how to shut down the private schools and re-establish a public education system.

Public schools were the great social and economic leveler for the last century of American history; Republicans want to end that and instead advantage wealthy children over their lower-income peers, particularly those whose skin is darker than Trump’s spray tan.

Public schools (and free college) made it possible for America to produce an explosion of invention and innovation throughout the mid-20th century; now other countries are surpassing us, as the dumbing-down of our kids has become institutionalized in Red state after Red state.

And public schools gave many students their first experience of interacting with people who look different from them and grew up under different circumstances, awakening many young people to the discrimination and unfairness inherent in how America has historically treated minorities.

All of which explains why Republicans so badly want to put an end to public education in America.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Resistance, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools
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