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Houston Chronicle Editorial: Three Theocratic Billionaires Threaten U.S. Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

The Houston Chronicle published a blistering editorial about the power of three billionaires who control Republican politics in Texas and threaten American democracy—not only in Texas. The three are adherents of Christian nationalism and dedicated funders of school vouchers. Their dream is to abolish public schools and enroll every student in a Christian school or home-schooled. They funded State Attorney General KennPaxton’s impeachment defense, and they are now funding Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign for vouchers.

The editorial board wrote:

Since its founding in the early 1880s, the little town of Cisco, 45 miles east of Abilene, has been in the news twice. In 1919, Conrad Hilton paid $40,000 for the Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, which eventually gained fame as the first in a worldwide chain of Hilton hotels. Eight years later, two days before Christmas 1927, Santa Claus and three of his helpers robbed the First National Bank of Cisco.

National notoriety will again fall on Cisco if Texas voters — Republican, Democrat and independent — don’t get engaged with their democracy sometime soon. The little town is home to the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, oil and fracking billionaires who, by playing Santa Claus to Republican officeholders receptive to far-right extremists, are on a mission to transform Texas into a Christian nationalist state. Their efforts, in conjunction with an even more influential West Texas oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of Midland, was on insidious display during the recent impeachment trial of the most corrupt state attorney general in America.

Ken Paxton skated, not necessarily because he was innocent of the charges that 121 House members, including 60 Republicans, brought against him. He’s back on the job and baying for RINO blood because most Republicans in the Texas Senate are either in thrall to the West Texas triumvirate or they tremble in terror at the prospect of being “primaried” by a Wilks-and-Dunn-anointed challenger. All 19 Republican senators and at least half of the Republican House members have taken money from the West Texas billionaires or their affiliated PACs and organizations.

The biggest recipient by far in this state is none other than Paxton himself. It’s likely that the Wilks and Dunn trio paid for his $4 million impeachment defense, which included the time and effort of very expensive Houston lawyers, Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the judge during the impeachment trial, also is beholden to the West Texans. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC donated $1 million to the lite guv, while loaning him another $2 million. The PAC largesse came shortly before Patrick began presiding over Paxton’s trial, a trial that ended with a fiery Patrick speech denouncing the impeachment process.

In addition to being fossil-fuel billionaires, both Dunn and Farris Wilks are Christian nationalist evangelists — Dunn as a lay preacher for the Midland Bible Church, Wilks as a preacher for a Cisco congregation founded by his father called the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church. Dan Wilks and his wife oversee the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, a group funded with a portion of the $3.2 billion the brothers made when they sold the majority stake of their Cisco-based oil field trucking company, Frac Tech Services.

From the pulpit to the campaign pockets of politicians, the West Texans are on what they see as a God-imbued mission to transform Texas and beyond. Over the past 20 years, they’ve contributed nearly $100 million to think tanks, nonprofits, fundraising committees, websites and Texas candidates who support their crusade.

In their preaching and practice, climate change is merely God’s will; homosexuality is an evil on par with incest, bestiality and pedophilia; abortion is murder, unlawful with no exceptions; gun owners enjoy a God-given right to carry their weapons in public without permits or training; only Christians have the God-given right to hold leadership positions in government (which, as Texas Monthly reported, left former House Speaker Joe Strauss, who is Jewish, beyond the pale). Also, oil and gas is a gift from God to be used with gratitude. (They don’t mention God’s gift of sunlight and wind.)

Kel Seliger, a longtime GOP state senator from Amarillo, ran afoul of the triumvirate in recent years. Reasonable, affable and conservative, Seliger is no longer in the Legislature. “It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” he told CNN last year. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”

What those “really, really wealthy people” want these days is to destroy Texas public education, a hotbed, as they tell it, of critical race theory and other elements of what one Dunn-and-Wilks-backed group calls “Marxist and sexual indoctrination,” all funded by “far-Left elites for decades.” (That would be the Texas taxpayer.) [Bold-face added by DR, here and below.]

Their strategy, as Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, told Chron.com, is to recruit a generation of Wilks and Dunn-funded mouthpieces in state and local positions to push the narrative that public schools are harmful to students and their parents. Once public education is weakened beyond repair, they offer private religious schools as “a better way.”

With an insidious, well-funded effort, our home-grown theocrats will make sure that Gov. Greg Abbott has all the financial ammunition he needs in the next few weeks for his last-ditch, special-session effort to persuade lawmakers to use taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private, often Christian-based schooling. Abbott calls it “school choice.” Rural lawmakers, who’ve fought the plan for years, know it’s school suicide.

The West Texans “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former state Sen. Bob Deuell, a northeast Texas Republican, told CNN. Deuell, a physician, got crossways with the West Texans when he supported a bill that updated the state’s end-of-life procedures. Dan Wilks, falsely claiming that the legislation would “strengthen Texas’s death panels,” backed tea party activist Bob Hall, who defeated Deuell in 2014. Hall was one of Paxton’s most outspoken supporters during the impeachment trial.

Texas is a big state, but the West Texans have Christian nationalist ambitions beyond our borders. They are reliable supporters of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and, of course, former President Donald Trump, who decried Paxton’s “shameful impeachment.” In an expansive, post-impeachment mood these days, Paxton seems to be pondering a larger field of dreams for himself. He told Tucker Carlson last week he may challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “His time is done,” Paxton told a radio talk-show host.

If Trump wins the presidential election next year, the disgraced Texas AG would be a prime candidate to head the U.S. Justice Department. (His paramour, the woman he brought from San Antonio to Austin, could be installed in a Georgetown townhouse, only a short Uber ride away from Justice.) He (they) would be right at home in a Trumpian Washington, where, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney said to The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

The party’s presidential nominee in 2012 has said he worries about the survival of America’s democratic experiment.

Whether it survives depends in large part on what happens here in Texas, where the national far right comes for funding and ideas. Decades of one-party rule have contributed to voter apathy and made our state a fertile testing ground for extreme policies. It’s telling, for example, that the AG was reelected last year with the support of about 13 percent of the populace (4 million votes out of a population of nearly 30 million). Paxton and other Dunn and Wilks dependents only have to listen to their West Texan Santa Claus trio, not to the people of Texas.

On a Friday morning in Cisco nearly a century ago, a little girl was among the first to notice that the Santa who stepped out of a stolen Buick and into the lobby of the First National Bank was a fake (and a dangerous one, at that). In Texas these days, maybe we’ve grown jaded. Perhaps it will be young voters of all political persuasions who will take the lead in calling out — and rejecting — the dangerous extremists in our midst. Perhaps taking heart from the brave Republicans who dared impeach an errant AG, they’ll elect representatives of the people, not altar boys and girls on call for Christian nationalists.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Dark Money, Democracy, Freedom, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Trump

Pastors for Texas Children Call on Governor Abbott to Respect Separation of Church and State

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
3

Governor Greg Abbott convened a tele-town hall of Christian faith leaders that he would convene a special session of the legislature in October to push for vouchers. If the don’t pass, he will call another special session. He will reconvene the legislature again and again until they pass a voucher that will give about $8,000 to every eligible student. The Texas Senate supports vouchers; the Texas House does not.

The Legislative Budget Board estimated that legislation would cost Texas $4.9 billion through 2028. It failed to get out of the House Public Education Committee.

“I’m never going to be in support of sending our precious taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools that don’t have to meet any of the requirements that our public schools have to meet. This is going to destroy public education in the state of Texas,” State Rep. James Talarico, D-Round Rock, told Nexstar Tuesday.

The Pastors for Texas Children have steadfastly defended public schools and opposed vouchers for religious schools. Under the leadership of Pastor Charles Foster Johnson, PTC has inspired similar organizations in other states where public schools are besieged by religious groups and politicians who want the taxpayers to fund religious schools. PTC makes clear that church and state should remain separate as a matter of principle. The Founding Fathers understood that, which is why the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any law regarding the establishment of religion and protects the free exercise of religion.

Pastors for Texas Children issued the following statement in response to Governor Greg Abbott’s aggressive lobbying for voucher legislation.

PTC Responds to Governor’s Town Hall

In an unprecedented violation of God’s law of religious liberty and the American doctrine of the separation of church and state, Governor Greg Abbott this afternoon called on ministers and pastors to use God’s pulpit to push his private school voucher program.

Specifically, October 15 has been designated as pro-voucher Sunday.

“The people of Texas know an eternal truth that seems to escape Gov. Abbott, that all genuine faith is voluntary and cannot properly be endorsed or supported by the authority of the state,” said Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, executive director of Pastors For Texas Children.

“The use of public tax dollars to subsidize religious instruction is a sin against God.”

The governor’s initiative today is in direct response to Pastors For Texas Children’s decade long-opposition to the diversion of public funds for private and religious schools.

PTC is very intentional in its messaging to keep politics out of our pulpits. Our engagements are conducted by individual clergy outside formal times of religious gatherings.

Furthermore, the threats made by the governor this afternoon against pro-public education State Representatives is an inappropriate and desperate attempt to intimidate dedicated public servants representing the interests of their people.

This crass bullying is particularly odious.

The truth of the matter is that the House of Representatives of the State of Texas opposes private school vouchers, as they have for over two decades.

That will not change no matter how many special legislative sessions the governor calls.

Pastors For Texas Children stands strong for the universal education of all God’s children, provided and protected by the public trust, and opposes all attempts to privatize it for sectarian religious and political reasons.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

New Hampshire: Republicans Increase Vouchers Despite Public Opposition

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
7

Gary Rayno of InsideNH writes about the expansion of the state voucher plan by Republicans in New Hampshire, who control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. Income requirements were raised. Enrollment increased. 75% of last year’s students never attended a public school. The biggest beneficiary is religious schools. When the voucher program was first proposed, public opposition was overwhelming. Governor Sununu and the legislators didn’t care.

Open the link to read it all.

Rayno writes:

The war over public education was on full display last week in the battle over PragerU’s financial literacy course and the State Board of Education’s 5-0 decision to approve it.

Despite opposition from the vast majority of speakers and letter writers, the board — stacked with school choice advocates by Gov. Chris Sununu — voted 5-0, with board chair Drew Cline abstaining.

While the controversial organization’s foot in the door was lamented by many after the vote, the on-line financial literacy course will not “cost” the state anything, which cannot be said about the biggest battleground in the education war, the Education Freedom Accounts program.

Last week, Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which administers the program, told the freedom account oversight committee about 1,600 new students joined the program for this school year bringing the total number of students to around 4,200, but noted those were rough figures and the Department of Education should be posting the exact figures soon.

While the program is growing, only one major change was made the last legislative session, which increased the financial threshold from 300 percent of poverty to 350 percent.

That increases the threshold for the current school year from $59,160 for a family of two, to $69,020, and for a family of four from $90,000 to $105,000 annually.

Once a family qualifies for the program there are no future financial limits on earnings.

Demers told the oversight committee 200 plus students’ families qualified under the higher income threshold than would have under the former limit.

Last school year, the Department of Education data indicates 3,196 students participated in the program with the average grant per student $4,860 with a total cost of more than $15.5 million without administrative expenses.

The program for the first two years was about $24 million over budget as the department’s estimates of student participation was much lower than reality.

For this school year, there are about 1,000 more total students participating, Baker Demers said about 600 students left the program to either return to public schools, who graduated (111), moved away or for some other reason.

Along with the 1,000 increase in students, lawmakers increased the state’s basic adequacy grant from $3,787 per student to $4,100, and also increased the amount of additional aid for students in low-income families, and with special education needs.

That is likely to make the new average per pupil cost go over $5,200 per student.

That would increase the total costs not counting administrative costs from the scholarship fund organization — to about $22 million this year, an increase of about $7 million.

The state budget contains $30 million in each year of the biennium for the program, so total costs are likely to bump against the $60 million if there is much growth in the program next year.

Most programs with increases like this would be curtailed and limited with talk about halting runaway growth, but that does not appear to be a big concern of the majority party, which has pushed the program along with Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and Sununu.

Democrats are the ones seeking to put guardrails around the program that draws its money from the Education Trust Fund, the source of all state education aid that is not the Statewide Education Property Tax….

The program was sold as an opportunity for low-income families to send their child to a program more appropriate for their learning skills than a public school.

But that has not been the biggest driver and represents a small percentage of the students enrolled.

About 75 percent of the participants in the past were enrolled in private schools — either religious or secular — and in home school programs.

Whether that figure remains in similar proportion is not something anyone will know until the Department of Education shares its data on its website.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, New Hampshire, Religion, Vouchers

Justin Parmenter: North Carolina Funds Bigoted Christian Academy

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2023 //
2

NBCT high school teacher Justin Parmenter frequently tweets (X’s) about politics and schools in North Carolina. He has been reviewing the religious schools that take vouchers. Here is the latest.

Fayetteville Christian got $1.3m NC taxpayer dollars this year. They deny admissions to non-Christians and LGBTQ (whom they refer to as “deviate and perverted”).

I don’t want my public dollars going to institutions that can discriminate this way. #nced #ncga #ncpol

His Twitter handle is his name.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Vouchers

North Carolina: Voucher Teachers Required to “Speak in Tongues” at This School

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2023 //
16

Justin Parmenter, an NBCT-certified teacher in North Carolina, has been posting interesting facts on Twitter (X) about religious schools in North Carolina that accept voucher students. That is, the public is paying most or all of their tuition.

Here is the latest:

NC requires public school teachers to hold a license.

Durham, NC’s Mt. Zion Christian Acad receives public $ for vouchers. They require their teachers to demonstrate their relationship w/the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues.

A license is optional. #nced #ncpol #ncga

@justinparmenter

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

The Man Who Won Billions of Tax Dollars for Home Schoolers

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2023 //
18

Emma Brown and Peter Jamison wrote in The Washington Post about Michael Farris, the conservative Christian lawyer who led the campaign to spend tax dollars on home schooling and prevailed. The reporters got hold of a recorded phone call in which Farris told his funders that the time has come to take down public education. The recording was obtained by an organization called “Documented.”

The message Michael Farris had come to deliver was a simple one: The time to act was now.

For decades, Farris — a conservative Christian lawyer who is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement — had toiled at the margins of American politics. His arguments about the harms of public education and the divinely endowed rights of parents had left many unconvinced.

Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.

The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling.

“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”

“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”

The 50-minute recording, whose details Farris did not dispute in a series of interviews with The Post, is a remarkable demonstration of how the ideology he has long championed has moved from the partisan fringe to the center of the nation’s bitter debates over public education.

A deeply religious evangelical from Washington state, Farris began his career facing off with social workers over the rights of home-schoolers and representing Christian parents who objected to “Rumpelstiltskin” being read in class.

In recent years, he has reached the pinnacle of the conservative legal establishment. From 2017 to 2022, he was the president and chief executive of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerhouse Christian legal groupthat helped draft and defend the restrictive Mississippi abortion law that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ADF and its allieshave filed a flurry of state and federal lawsuits over the past two years alleging that public schools are violating parental and religious rights.

Yet it is outside the courtroom that Farris’s influence has arguably been most profound. No single figure has been more instrumental in transforming the parental rights cause from an obscure concern of Christian home-schoolers into a GOP rallying cry.

When former president Donald Trump called for a federal parental bill of rights in a 2023 campaign video, saying secular public school instruction had become a “new religion,” he was invoking arguments Farris first made 40 years ago. The executive order targeting school mask mandates that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed on his first day in office cited a 2013 state law guaranteeing “fundamental” parental rights that Farris helped write.

In Florida, a home-schooling mom introduced Farris’s ideas to a state lawmaker, setting in motion the passage of the state’s Parents’ Bill of Rights in 2021. The law, repeatedly touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the presidential campaign trail, laid the groundwork for the state’s controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed by its critics the “don’t say gay” bill.

“He is our hero,” Patti Sullivan, the home-schooler involved in Florida’s 2021 law, said of Farris. “He is the father of the modern movement in parental rights.”

Fundamental parental rights measures have been proposed or enacted this year in more than two dozen other states, according to a Post analysis using the legislation-tracking database Quorum, and in March, a federal parents’ bill of rights passed the Republican-controlled House.

Farris has not been personally involved in pushing the most recent bills, which have been fueled by anger over covid-19 mask mandates and how schools are handling Black history, sexual orientation and gender identity. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing groupMoms for Liberty, which has become a powerful force in the parental rights movement since its launch less than three years ago, said it would be a mistake to overemphasize the impact of conservative Christian home-schoolers on the battles now playing out across the country.

Justice said she has met Farris but that the arguments he was making in the 1980s haven’t strongly influenced her organization, whose members have pushed to remove some books with LGBTQ+ themes from schools and to restrict what teachers can say about race and gender.

“It’s 2023,” she said. “There are a lot of things that people thought 40 years ago.”

Yet to those who have followed Farris’s career, the adoption of his arguments by so many families unconnected to home schooling is a measure of his success. In the eyes of his critics, he has masterfully imported an extreme religious agenda into the heart of the nation’s politics through the seemingly unobjectionable language of parents’ rights. Some argue that it has always been the goal of the most radical Christian home-schoolers not merely to opt out of the public schools but to transform them, either by diverting their funding or allowing religion back into the classroom.

“Everyone should be aware of Michael Farris and his influence on the Christian right,” said R.L. Stollar, a children’s rights advocate who was home-schooled and has long warned of the conservative home-schooling movement’s political goals. “To Farris’s credit, he is really good at what he does. He is really good at taking these more extreme positions and presenting them as if they are something that would just be based on common sense.”

The story continues in extensive detail about Farris’s battles to win acceptance and public funding for home schooling.

He tried but failed to criminalize gay sex. His biggest victories have been in his demands to expand home schooling. He and his wife have 10 children. They enrolled her in a public school, bur removed her after two months. They put her in a Christian school but withdrew her after concluding she was being influenced by other 6-year-olds.

Farris wrote that public schools are “a godless monstrosity.”

And he wrote that by their very nature, public schools indoctrinate:

“Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act,” he said. “What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion, no matter what.”

My view: public schools unite us as a nation, a people, and a democracy. While there are some highly-educated people like Michael Farris who homeschool their children, many uneducated people are following their lead and their children will be indoctrinated into their religion and be poorly educated.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans

Josh Cowen: The Latest Research on Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2023 //
6

Josh Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University, summarizes the latest research on vouchers for the Brown Center Chalkboard, a publication of the Brookings Institution.

He finds several salient points:

  • In 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine expanded existing plans—highlighting a push that is largely coming from red states.
  • The last decade of achievement studies have shown negative voucher impacts, with more mixed or inconclusive results on attainment.
  • Data from traditional voucher programs has indicated that the larger the program, the worse the results tend to be.
  • Most students who use vouchers never attended public schools.
  • Many private schools raise their tuition to take advantage of voucher funding.
  • Many pop-up schools of dubious quality are created to receive voucher money.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Research, Vouchers

Ron DeSantis, Hypocrite

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
19

On August 20, the New York Times published a story about how Ron DeSantis joined the “ruling class” but now campaigns against it. His story is shot through with hypocrisy. He paints himself as the public school kid from middle-class Dunedin, Florida, surrounded by snobs from private schools who looked down on him. Yet now as governor, he treats public schools and their teachers with contempt and expanded vouchers to pay billions of taxpayer dollars for kids to go to private schools, including high-income families.

Why is he, the public school kid, subsidizing private and religious schools? Why is he so hostile to public schools? He complains that public schools indoctrinate their students yet he’s willing to send kids to religious schools whose purpose is indoctrination. Why does he subsidize the tuition of rich kids who go to private schools? Aren’t those the kind of kids who treated him with condescension?

Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.

The story begins:

“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.

Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”

Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk…

For Mr. DeSantis and his allies, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life, and schools are the most important battleground where they will be fought. “Education is our sword,” Mr. DeSantis’s then education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, explained to a Hillsdale audience in 2021. And Mr. DeSantis is the man to wield it — a self-made striver who was “given nothing,” as he told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May. “These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.”

DeSantis has aggressively taken political control of Florida’s schools and universities, passing laws that limit or eliminate what may be taught about gender and race. He has encouraged parent vigilantes to scour classrooms and libraries for books on controversial topics and ban them. His ally, radical conservative Chris Rufo, is quoted in the article:

“The goal of the university is not free inquiry,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the new trustees [of New College], said during a recent appearance in California. Instead, he argued, conservatives need to deploy state power to retake public institutions wherever they can.

“The universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized,” Mr. Rufo said. “We should repoliticize the universities and understand that education is at heart a political question.”

At Yale, DeSantis joined Delta Kappa Epsilon (Dekes), which was known for its vicious hazing of pledges. As an upper-class member, DeSantis was known for bullying pledges and forcing them to engage in pranks like dropping their pants and exposing their genitals, while the older members mocked their private parts.

The story says that DeSantis took a course on the Cold War taught by the esteemed scholar John Lewis Gaddis, who was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. In other words, DeSantis lied about being exposed to pro-Soviet views of the Cold War.

DeSantis portrayed Harvard Law School, where he studied, as a bastion of left wing thought. But the Dean of the law school when DeSantis arrived belonged to the conservative Federalist Society. And he was not the only member of that group on the faculty.

A 2005 survey of The Harvard Law Review, published in the Federalist Society’s flagship publication, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, found that staff members “identifying themselves as left-of-center did not comprise even a majority.”

DeSantis neglects to mention that he was an active member of the Harvard Law School’s Federalist Society. He prefers to play the victim.

When he ran for Congress and then for governor, he tapped his Yale and Harvard networks to raise money.

But then he discovered there was even more political advantage for him if he played the role of the enemy of the ruling class.

How better to attack the ruling class than to destroy the public schools that enabled him to enter Yale? If this makes no sense, neither does DeSantis’ fable about being victimized at Yale and Harvard.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Character, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Hypocrisy, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

California: School Board Set to Defend Ban on CRT with Help from Christian Law Firm

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2023 //
11

Christian conservatives won control of the school board of the Temacula Valley Unified School District in California. The first thing they did was enact a ban on critical race theory (no doubt they could not define what they banned). A lawsuit was filed by the teacher’s union and a group of students against the board to overturn the ban. The board accepted an offer from a law firm called Advocates for Faith & Freedom to represent the district. The law firm is known for its religious advocacy.

A nonprofit Murrieta law firm with a reputation for defending Christian conservatives will represent the Temecula Valley Unified School District in a lawsuit challenging the district’s ban on critical race theory.

In a special meeting, a divided Temecula school board Wednesday night, Aug. 9, accepted an offer from Advocates for Faith & Freedom to defend the public school district against the lawsuit announced Wednesday, Aug. 2, by Public Counsel’s Opportunity Under Law project, which is suing on behalf of the Temecula teacher’s union and eight students in the district, among others.

The lawsuit, filed in Riverside County Superior Court, alleges the critical race theory ban “hinders Temecula educators’ ability to teach state-mandated content standards, prepare for the coming academic year, and support rather than stifle student inquiry.”

The Temecula school board’s conservative majority — Joseph Komrosky, Danny Gonzalez and Jen Wiersma — enacted the ban the same December night it took office, roughly a month after winning three of five board seats with the backing of conservative Pastor Tim Thompson and a Christian conservative political action committee.

At the time, the majority said critical race theory — originally a term used to describe a graduate school course of study — was hateful and divisive and taught children to judge others by skin color, not character.

Critics argue the ban whitewashes truthful and important lessons about the role of race in U.S. history. The ban sparked two walkout protests by district high school students.

Advocates for Faith & Freedom specializes in representing Christian conservatives and their causes. It fought on behalf of California Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage before being overturned in court.

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Categories Bigotry, California, Censorship, Education Reform, Religion, Separation of church and state

North Carolina: Voucher Schools Get Tax Dollars with No Rules or Accountability

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2023 //
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Public Schools First North Carolina posted the following critique of the state’s newly expanded voucher program. Before it passed, the parent-led group projected that costs would soar to $550,000,000 annually, as a result of removing income limits. Instead of “saving poor kids from failing schools,” vouchers have become a way to subsidize the tuition of students from middle-income and upper-income families who never attended any public school.

Should teachers have some type of educational background or teaching license?

Should schools that receive public dollars provide transparency for how those dollars are spent?

Should North Carolinians expect to know how well students in schools funded by tax dollars are learning?

Should we have some assurance that our tax dollars are not being used to discriminate against groups of students and/or parents?

Should the governing body (i.e. school board) of each district be elected to represent the community it serves and held accountable by voters/taxpayers?

Whether your answer to these questions is yes or no, the degree to which schools actually have policies in place or are regulated in a way to address these questions depends entirely on whether they are traditional public schools, charter schools or private schools, even though all of them may be funded by our tax dollars.

With a massive NC private school voucher program expansion in the proposed House and Senate budgets, it is worth examining which policies apply to which schools and how much the public knows about the schools they’re funding. Although more than 70% of the U.S. population lives in households without a school-aged child, having a well-educated citizenry affects everyone, so accounting for how tax dollars are spent is important.

The NC Department of Administration Division of Non-Public Education registers and monitors both conventional private schools and homeschools. Each year, the division publishes a report containing the publicly available information on private schools. It’s a thin, three page report with minimal information: number of students by school, county, and year, number and percentage of school by type (i.e. independent or religious), and number and percentage of students by sex (i.e. male or female). Taxpayers funding school vouchers see no budget on how their money is being spent and there are no public meetings or ways to the public to give input on schools procedures or policies.

No information is provided by these private schools about student achievement or population subgroups such as special education, English learner, race, ethnicity, or family income status. Lacking any such data, it’s difficult for the public to know whether students are learning or if schools are discriminating against students or families.

In fact, although voucher-accepting private schools are required to administer an achievement test each year, they are allowed to select the test, be in charge of how it is administered and the results are not made publicly available. So the public is left with no objective measure of whether students are learning anything at all.

Traditional public schools and charter schools are required to follow the state standard course of study and show the assessment results, but voucher-receiving private schools have no curriculum guidelines at all. In fact, they could even operate under an “unschooling” philosophy while accepting public tax dollars.

In traditional public schools, 100% of the teaching staff must have a license or be working toward one to provide instruction to our children. In charter schools, the requirement if that just 50% of the teacher must be certified, and in private schools the requirement drops to 0%. Teachers do not to be certified nor do they have to even have a college degree.

Traditional public schools and charter schools must also provide a minimum of 185 days (or 1,025 hours) of instruction across at least nine months. Private schools have no minimum days or hours of instruction. They are simply required to provide some instruction across nine months in a given year. Private schools are also allowed to determine their own policies and procedures for handling excessive student absences, including the maximum number of days a student may be absent and remain enrolled. Compare this to the requirement we place on public schools for students attendance and related retention policies.

Although state law does prohibit private schools from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin, with no tracking mechanism in place to show that they comply or not making it a toothless requirement. And to date, state law does not require voucher-receiving private schools to follow other federal non-discrimination laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or Title IX. (See our report for more information), yet they would receive public tax dollars.

In contrast to the absence of private school data, the NC Department of Public Instruction makes extensive and detailed data available about student achievement, demographics, and school finances for traditional public schools and some data about charter schools. The public can find out how many students achieved a passing score on state tests, what a school or district’s demographic make-up looks like and how it has changed over time, whether students fall into special needs categories, how many disciplinary actions occurred in a given year, how much money was spent on teachers and textbooks versus facilities, and answers to just about any other question one can ask about schools. There is full transparency for tax dollars at work with public schools. Annual public audits of the financial books is required by state law and available to the public.

Traditional public school leadership is also open to public scrutiny, as the past few years have highlighted. Traditional school boards must conduct some public meetings and provide an opportunity for public comment. Not so for charter and private schools – there is no public input required or allowed.

In addition, all traditional public school board members must live within their school district and have to be elected by registered voters. These elected board members represent the communities they serve where all citizens, whether parents or not, can vote in school board elections. However, only 50% of charter school board members must reside in North Carolina and elections are not required. There are no residency or election requirements for private school board members along with no requirement that their governing boards even be shown publicly.

All North Carolinians deserve to know whether their tax dollars are being spent responsibly to create a better community for everyone. Comparing requirements between traditional public schools and private schools reveals stark differences. When tax dollars are being spent to support private schools, the public needs accountability to prevent financial fraud and poor student outcomes.

More transparency for how voucher-receiving private schools use their public funds would also help legislators make more-informed budget and policy decisions and evaluate the value of the money spent. Transparency and meaningful data are important requirements when hard-earned public tax dollars are funneled to unaccountable private schools, the same information we expect from publicly funded public schools.

Isn’t it curious that many of the same people who demanded strict accountability for public schools insist on no accountability for voucher schools?

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, North Carolina, Religion, Separation of church and state
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