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Jennifer Berkshire: Why Do So Many Democrats Refuse to Defend Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2022 //
58

Jennifer Berkshire inquires into why so many Democratic leaders and pundits have refused to defend public schools, even though most parents are satisfied with their public schools. As the public schools are blamed for all the evils of modern life by extremists like Chris Rufo, Democrats refuse to stand up for the public schools. She explores why in this article.

Parents are not abandoning the public schools, but Democratic politicians are.

She begins:

Last spring, taking a break from waging conspiratorial campaigns against the republic, an assortment of luminaries associated with the Claremont Institute gathered to lay out a plan to foment a culture war against the nation’s schools. The Clubhouse event, entitled “Building A New Right: Red States vs. Wokeness,” featured a grab bag of Claremont fellows and friends. The star attraction was Manhattan Institute agitprop specialist Christopher Rufo, chief sower of the panics against critical race theory (CRT) and “grooming.”

In a now familiar exercise, Rufo sketched out his campaign to make CRT toxic as part of a larger propaganda war against public institutions. The ultimate goal, he explained, was essentially to do away with those institutions and redirect school funding to families and individuals based on their “values.” Rufo waxed apocalyptic about the scourge of “wokeness,” and yet he struck a hopeful note. After all, he reminded listeners, it had only taken the country a few years to go from the Black Panthers to Nixon.

In the ensuing months, Rufo’s propaganda campaign would grow increasingly lurid, but on this occasion, he urged his audience to raise the discussion to a higher level. Focus on “excellence,” he admonished them, and attack public schools for failing to meet that standard. Conservative communications guru David Reaboi, who helped seed a previous moral panic on the right against the sinister spread of Sharia law, weighed in with some messaging advice of his own: Go full bore against the teachers unions. Do damage.

Today, this coordinated plan to wage a public relations war against the nation’s public schools is an undeniable success. Forty-two states have moved to restrict teaching about oppression, race or gender. According to one estimate, more than one third of students in the country attend school in a state where educators are now subject to some kind of classroom gag order.

The achievement of Rufo and his allies is all the more astonishing, given the deep unpopularity of the policies they champion. Polls consistently show that voters across party lines are repelled by the GOP’s education extremism. Across the chasm of our current political divide, bipartisan majorities are largely in agreement that banning books and gagging teachers is bad.

And for all of the insurgent right’s bold rhetoric about mining parent outrage for electoral gold, the polls that matter most have shown remarkably poor results for candidates running on scorched-earth education platforms. In New Hampshire, New York, Montana, Georgia, Wisconsin and beyond, voters are rejectingright-wing culture warriors, often by wide margins—a movement that might be summed up as “keeping the crazy away from the kids.”

There’s just one problem, though: The leadership of the Democratic party doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Supporting public schools

Tennessee: The Rightwing Plan for Hillsdale Charters Just Backfired

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2022 //
66

Molly Olmstead writes in Slate that the rightwing plan to replace public schools with charter schools just took a big step backward in Tennessee. Governor Bill Lee, an evangelical Christian, wanted to bring 100 charter schools designed by extremist Hillsdale College to Tennessee to spread the gospel of patriotism, capitalism, and evangelical religion to the state. Hillsdale scaled the plan back to 50 schools, expecting to spread them across the state.

But then someone taped a conversation between Bill Lee and Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale. Arnn said insulting things about teachers. The Governor didn’t speak up. Then school boards got angry. They respect their teachers. Their teachers are their neighbors. Lots of Tennessee teachers are Republicans. Their neighbors don’t think they are “radical Marxists.” They know they are not “grooming” their children.

Arnn and Lee made the Hillsdale brand toxic. Arnn was out of touch. So was Governor Lee. The people of Tennessee don’t want to dump their public schools. They don’t like it when people dump on their teachers.

Back off, Governor Lee.

Go back to Michigan, Larry Arnn.

Categories Education Industry, Hoax, Republicans, Rural Schools, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Tennessee

Arthur Camins: Democrats Should Not Parrot Republicans. It’s a Losing Strategy.

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2022 //
56

Arthur Camins is a lifelong educator and social justice activist. In this post, he explains why Democrats are wrong to pursue Republican voters with Republican themes instead of promoting policies that uplift the common good. Centrism has not helped the Democratic Party.

He writes:

Republicans lead. Democrats follow. And that makes all the difference. Libertarian and wealth-protecting Republican ideologues invest to influence and change most people’s normative ideas and values, whereas Democrats seek to discern and appeal to what voters already think. That has been the case for decades. It has been a triumph for conservatism and the protection of privilege. For Democrats, it remains a losing strategy to win elections, a disaster for a more equitable nation, or any hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

The Republican’s route to power has been to shift public thinking toward several big ideas and implied values: Resources are scarce and therefore competition and inequity are natural and inevitable. Therefore, the pursuit of personal advancement is the only reasonable course of action. In that context, the advance of underrepresented minorities has been understood as coming at the expense of White people. The values message has been, “Look out for yourself because no one else will.” That dystopian message is designed to enable Republicans’ core idea: Financial regulation and taxes on wealth are a counterproductive limitation.

Responding to Republican inroads with white working class and lower-middle class voters in the Nixon and Reagan years, Democratic leadership, led in particular by Bill Clinton, pursued a different approach. They attempted to gain or retain political office by discerning how people already think and crafting appeals and policies to meet them. In pursuit of votes of the elusive undecided voters, Democrats picked up on conservative themes, ceding the war of ideas to Republicans.

For example, upon signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and in an exchange with reporters on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton said, “The new bill restores America’s basic bargain of providing opportunity and demanding, in return, responsibility.”

Clinton was responding to Ronald Reagan’s characterization of minority welfare recipients as con artists eating steak and driving Cadillacs living off the tax contributions of hardworking, law-abiding white workers.

The theme was still very much in play in 2013 when in an economics speech at Knox College, President Obama declared:

“Here in America, we’ve never guaranteed success — that’s not what we do. More than in some other countries, we expect people to be self-reliant. Nobody is going to do something for you. We’ve tolerated a little more inequality for the sake of a more dynamic, more adaptable economy. That’s all for the good. But that idea has always been combined with a commitment to equality of opportunity to upward mobility — the idea that no matter how poor you started, if you’re willing to work hard and discipline yourself and defer gratification, you can make it, too. That’s the American idea.”

So, we have Democrats at the highest level parroting the conservative shibboleth that poverty is a problem of the failure of personal responsibility and self-discipline rather than racism and inequity built into the structure of our socio-economic system.

Mainstream Democratic response to the push for charter schools is yet another example of their acceptance of deeply conservative language and with it, its underlying ideology. Publicly supported alternatives to democratically governed public education have several roots: getting tax dollars for religiously based schools; support for schools to skirt the Supreme Court rulings against the segregationist separate-but-equal doctrine; acceptance of the idea that government-led bureaucracies cannot be reformed democratically; attempts to squeeze profit from K-12 schools at taxpayers’ expense; and last but not least, undermining the influence of strong public-sector unions. The tagline du-jour for all of this is the right to parental choice, the core of which is the idea that education is a personal consumer good rather than a shared society necessity.

The bipartisan education policy of the last forty years has been a response to insecurity. American schools predictably fail to live up to the absurd disingenuous or naïve promise that education can provide equity in a systemically inequitable society. For Republicans, such insecurity is an opportunity to sew fear and division while promoting their everyone-out-for-yourself dogma. Unfortunately, Democrats rather than challenge that core ideology, have settled for, “You can’t save everyone, so let’s save a few.”

Keep reading.

Categories Charter Schools, Clinton, Courage, Democrats, Elections, Obama, Racism, Republicans, Supporting public schools

Berkshire and Schneider: Voters in School Board Elections Reject Slanders Against Their Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2022 //
6

Hello, Democrats! Wake up!

Journalist Jennifer Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider report that voters in school board elections are not falling for rightwing slanders of their public schools and teachers!

Democrats: your best strategy for the fall elections is to campaign aggressively for public schools.

Berkshire and Schneider write that Democrats were panicked by Glenn Youngkin’s election as Governor in Virginia, which they attributed to his attacks on “critical race theory” in the schools and his pandering to far-right fake parents’ groups. Steve Bannon (and Chris Rufo) claimed that the road to a takeover was by seizing control of local school boards and destroying public schools.

Berkshire and Schneider say that their campaign is failing. Even in Trump territory, voters are supporting their public schools and rejecting the crazies.

They write:

As it turns out, GOP candidates running on scorched-earth education platforms have fared quite poorly in school board elections. In places like Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire and New York, voters have rejected culture warriors running for school board, often doing so by wide margins. A recent Ballotpedia review of more than 400 school board contests in Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin found that race, gender and COVID were indeed influential in determining election outcomes, but not in the way one might expect. As they found, candidates who ran in opposition to a “conflict issue” — sexual education curricula, for instance, or a focus on race in the district — were more likely to lose their races.

Cherokee County, Ga., a rural county northwest of Atlanta, offers an instructive example. The county’s schools made national headlines recently after ProPublica reported on a group of white parents protesting the hiring of a Black educator brought on to serve as the first Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer. Yet voters in the county, which Trump won by nearly 70 percent in 2020, overwhelmingly rejected hardline candidates for school board. A self-proclaimed family values slate, backed by the national 1776 Project PAC, and which ran in opposition to critical race theory and school district equity plans, failed to pick up a single seat.

Voters in Coweta County, Ga., sent a similar message to another slate of candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project. All four challengers were bested by board incumbents in the May primary, while a fifth — a controversial incumbent who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection and claimed that students were being indoctrinated with critical race theory through district-provided Chromebooks — was unseated by a landslide in a runoff election in June.

It isn’t that these deep red countries have suddenly begun to turn blue. Instead, the culture war approach is falling short because Americans have direct experiences that contradict what they’re hearing from candidates.

Please open the link and read the good news for yourself.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Community Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Equity, Lies, Parents, Privatization, Racism, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Michael Tomasky: Public Schools Are Good for Society!

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2022 //
24

Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, summarizes the war against public education and why it is so crucial to our society. Yes, everyone must support public schools, whether or not they have children. Everyone must pay to educate all children. Because doing so is for the good of society!

Tomasky is a public school parent. He read the article about the effort by Free Staters to defund the public schools in Croydon, New Hampshire, and he was appalled. Supporting the public schools for all children is

so obviously essential to civilized life that it’s shocking we even have to defend it. But alas, because the American right wing is so bananas these days, defend it we must.

The Free Staters in New Hampshire want to live without any government. They want to live without a state. They already fired the town’s line police officer. Then they went for the town’s public school budget, proposing to cut its budget in half.

I’ve actually been wondering for many years when the right was going to get around to this line of attack. As matters stand in the United States of America, and as far as I know more or less everywhere in the developed world, education is paid for by the state—either mostly by local governments (the United States), or the national government (France). This web page gives a good summary of how public education is funded around the globe. It’s a fairly recent consensus in historical terms—only in the last half of the twentieth century have countries like Brazil, India, and Colombia come to accept that they have to pay the freight for universal education. But accept it they have. As a result, educational inequality around the world has decreased dramatically.

In the U.S., of course, public education is mostly funded by property taxes and financed by local governments. There are problems with this, as there are with any system invented by imperfect human beings, the main one being that rich districts have a lot more money and thus much better schools; but even still, the good part is that we as a society accept the idea that we all have to contribute. It does not matterwhether you have children in the schools. The principle is that even if you are childless, or your children have grown and gone to college, or you send them to private school, or school them yourself at home, you still pay, and you pay because you benefit from a well-educated populace.

I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, home to great schools and high taxes. My daughter happens to go to a public school that is excellent (and happily just up the street). But even if I had no daughter, or sent her to a private school, I would still agree that it was my responsibility to pay for the great public schools my county offers children. It makes for a better county, a better class of citizen, a better nation.

This is a core principle of civilized society: We all contribute to certain activities that have clear universal social benefit. To use Underwood’s sick terminology, that guy pays for that guy’s child to be educated because the first guy benefits when the second guy’s kid is learning math and science and pondering Hamlet’s soliloquy and being prepared for responsible, productive adulthood. Anyone who can’t see that connection is a selfish prick. And if nothing else, even selfish pricks ought to be able to see that good schools increase the value of their homes.The question of political philosophy is this: What is the common good—what must it include, and what is each citizen’s responsibility toward securing it? We decided in the U.S. a little more than a century ago that universal public education, free to every child and paid for by all of us, was central to any definition of a common good. The world, as I noted above, has largely come to agree.

An educated populace serves all of us. Debates about curricula are another issue, and those debates are legitimate, as long as people aren’t lying (my daughter, who just finished sixth grade in a quite liberal school district, reports that yes, she’s learned all about Rosa Parks and so on, but no teacher has ever tried to make her feel guilty about being white).

But even both sides in that debate accept that the public schools are a common good; they just disagree about what should be taught.

More broadly, conservatives have been trying to undermine public education for 70 years now. This goes back to Brown v. Board of Education, in whose wake many Southern school districts set up all-white segregation academies or in some cases stopped collecting the local taxes that supported public schools (it took a Supreme Court decision in 1968, a full 14 years after Brown,to end the most egregious forms of that racist mischief).

Then, starting in earnest in the 1980s, under Reagan-era education secretary and insufferable moral crusader Bill “Snake Eyes”Bennett, the right promoted school vouchers and charter schools, both of which, numerous studies have found, have simply not been the panacea the right advertised them to be. Right-wing rich people and foundations have spent God knows how many millions since then promoting these private educational alternatives. That’s their right, of course. But imagine if they’d spent those millions trying to shore up public schools in poor districts, or financing early reading programs for poor children from Harlem to eastern Kentucky to the reservations of Arizona. The country would be so much better off.

The Free Staters failed in Croydon. The small population mobilized to save their schools.

I expect the coming years will see the mainstreaming of the argument that people who aren’t parents of public-school children shouldn’t have to pay for schools. Liberals must fight back tooth and nail, and not on some statistical point cooked up by some timid pollster, but at the very philosophical root of the argument. We cannot retreat from a century-old consensus that has done the nation enormous good.

Michael Tomasky  @mtomasky

Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic.

The Supreme Court’s Holy War Against Public Schools

Katherine Stewart

How Leonard Leo Became the Grey Cardinal of the American Right

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Republicans, Supporting public schools

Croydon, New Hampshire: A Surprising Victory for Public Schools and Democracy!

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2022 //
27

In 2001, libertarian political scientist Jason Sorens proposed the creation of a “free state.” He appealed to other libertarians to cluster in one small state, where enough of them would be able to eliminate laws and authority and “live free.” That state was New Hampshire, and the libertarians have joined hands with Republicans to impose their agenda on others who don’t share it. Earlier this spring, Free Staters proposed that New Hampshire secede and became an independent nation, but that proposal failed overwhelmingly, in part because enough people realized it was nutty and/or they didn’t want to give up their Social Security.

Dan Barry wrote in The New York Times about an effort by Free Staters in Croydon, New Hampshire, to cut the town’s school budget in half.

As is typical in many towns and cities across the nation, not many people show up for local elections, or in this case, the town meeting. One of the members of the Croydon board of selectmen, Ian Underwood, proposed cutting the town budget for schools by more than half, from $1.7 million to $800,000.

In pamphlets he brought to the meeting, Mr. Underwood asserted that sports, music instruction and other typical school activities were not necessary to participate intelligently in a free government, and that using taxes to pay for them “crosses the boundary between public benefit and private charity.”

The pamphlet did not note that its author was a 1979 graduate of the public high school in Chesterton, Ind., where he starred on the tennis team, ran track, played intramural sports and joined extracurricular activities in math, creative writing, radio and student government. Also: National Honor Society member, National Merit finalist and valedictorian.

One person not completely gobsmacked by Mr. Underwood’s proposal was the school board chairwoman: his wife, Jody Underwood. The Underwoods, who do not have children, moved to Croydon from Pennsylvania in 2007 in part to join the Free State mission; they are now considered a Free State power couple.

Underwood’s radical proposal passed by 20-14. It was a victory for the Free Staters. As the Underwoods did media interviews, they gloated:

Mr. Underwood asked what for him appears to be a fundamental question — “Why is that guy paying for that guy’s kids to be educated?” — and denied that he and his wife were “in cahoots.”

Many people in Croydon were “livid.” They realized this radical act was the result of their indifference.

But they were also chastened. They hadn’t attended the town meeting. They hadn’t fulfilled their democratic obligation. They hadn’t kept informed about the Free State movement. To some observers, they had gotten what they deserved…

From this muddle of anger, confusion and regret, though, a movement was born. It came to be known as We Stand Up for Croydon Students.

Conservatives, liberals and those who shun labels — “an entirely nonpartisan group,” said Ms. Damon, one of the members — began meeting online and in living rooms to undo what they considered a devastating mistake. They researched right-to-know laws, sought advice from nonprofits and contacted the state attorney general’s office to see whether they had any legal options.

They did: Under New Hampshire law, citizens could petition for a special meeting where the budget cut could be overturned — if at least half the town’s voters were present and cast ballots.

Ms. Beaulieu, 44, a project manager for a kitchen and bath store, helped to gather enough signatures for the necessary petition. Once a date in May was set for the special meeting, she and other volunteers spread the word, knocking on doors, conducting phone banks and planting lawn signs…

The crisis in Croydon generated a curious democratic dynamic. Since the law required that at least half the town’s electorate participate in the special meeting’s vote for it to be binding, those trying to overturn the Underwood budget encouraged people to attend, while those hoping to retain it encouraged people to do just the opposite and stay home.

On the chilly Saturday morning of May 7, Croydon residents filed into a spacious building at the local YMCA camp for their special meeting. The We Stand Up contingent needed at least 283 voters.

The turnout: 379.

The vote in favor of overturning the Underwood budget: 377.

The vote against: 2.

The We Stand Up crowd cheered and hugged, leaving Mr. Underwood to vent online with posts titled “Your House Is My A.T.M.” and “Possibly Dumbest Thing I’ve Heard Someone Say, Ever,” and Dr. Underwood to frame the moment as both an impressive voter turnout and a victory for “mob rule.”

“It felt to me like a bunch of woke people came to Croydon,” she said.

What happened in Croydon is a lesson for us all.

Get out and vote.

Do not let the neo-fascists, neo-Confederates, racists, and conspiracy theorists take over.

Fight for democracy or lose it.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Funding, New Hampshire, Supporting public schools

Christine Langhoff: A Victory for Boston Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2022 //
17

Yesterday, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education and the Mayor of Boston reached an agreement not to label the Boston Public Schools “underperforming” and the state backed away from taking control of the district. Perhaps they realized that state takeovers typically make things worse, not better.

Our reader Christine Langhoff is a retired teacher in Boston. She added the following informed comment.

Christine Langhoff writes:

Despite the Boston Globe’s heartfelt desire for privatization – its education reporting is outsourced to privatizers and charteristas at The Barr Foundation – public pushback had an impact. The state has had zero success in the school systems where it intervened, when measured by the metric the state board loves: test scores. Boston scores, even during the virtual schooling of the pandemic, have been higher than in Lawrence, Springfield, Holyoke and Southbridge, where the state is in charge. They failed to get this done before Governor Charlie Baker – funded by the Kochs and the Waltons – leaves office this year.

Our newly elected mayor, Michelle Wu, has her own two young sons in BPS and is committed to public education. She has refused to back away from her advocacy for the schools. Her predecessor, Marty Walsh (now Biden’s Secretary of Labor), was himself a founder of a charter school, and underfunded the schools during all seven years of his mayoralty. He made no effort to solve the issues cited in the state’s report in his quest to defund, destabilize, and destroy the school system.

Wu has managed in a brief time to recruit two excellent finalists for the superintendent’s position. Both of them are true public school educators who live in Boston. Mary Skipper’s three children are BPS graduates and Tommy Welch’s kids are presently enrolled as well. Contrast with Laura Perille, who was named superintendent by Walsh, despite being completely unqualified save for the fact that she ran an umbrella group for the foundations bent on privatization. (Perille took over from Broadie Tommy Chang, who was responsible in LA for the disastrous rollout of laptops.)

It’s a new day for public education in the city of Boston. The Waltons are somewhere, licking their wounds in defeat once again.

Categories Accountability, Boston, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, Massachusetts, Supporting public schools, Walton Foundation

Texas: Why Rural Communities Oppose School Choice

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2022 //
4

Vouchers are a big issue in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott recently announced he would promote them. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick—the Rush Limbaugh of Texas—is a voucher fanatic. Senator Ted Cruz said that school choice is the most important issue of our time.

But vouchers have died every time they are introduced in the legislature. Legislators from rural communities stand firm against vouchers. Jay Leeson explained why in the Dallas Morning News.

He wrote:

Vouchers are unpopular in places where public schools are the lifeblood of community.

With Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement that he’ll pursue “school choice” in the upcoming Legislature, there’s political math to be done.

The governor’s proposal is pencil whipping his previously reliable rural voting base, presuming that rural communities will stick with him as he looks past the November match-up against Beto O’Rourke, and moves to the next problem of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a probable 2024 presidential foe. But in rushing to check off another box on the national GOP purity exam, questionable work has been submitted.

Out where rural public schools constellate expansive Lone Star landscape, out where the real Texas economic miracle of food, fuel, and fiber is produced, there’s pencil scratching being done.

Rural folks know school choice will come at their expense. Almost like the same-old bait (moral convictions) and switch (economic interests) over and over. It’s been that way for more than 30 years, since the GOP came to power promising term limits and local control — and how has that gone?

We’ve voted for plenty of slippery-as-slop-jar scenarios, like numerous federal officials who vote against subsidies for the state’s $25 billion annual agriculture industry. In 2018, cotton had fallen out of a federal funding program to help producers break even, and it was Abbott who single-handedly stalled restoration from Austin. We’ve closed 26 hospitals since 2010. Now just 163 hospitals provide care for 85% of the state’s geography, many with limited services. We’ve incrementally upped local property taxes to fill state budget holes over three decades. And Abbott’s routing of state infrastructure, including pivotal rural telecommunications by his commissioned appointees, could make Santa Anna blush.

But the missing variable in the slippery school choice proposal is the importance of public schools to respective rural communities — and the pillars of community within those schools. I know because I attended them.

Gid Adkisson, a gargantuan man, long in kindness as he was physique, was a retired school superintendent in Abernathy (population 2,904, about 25 miles north of Lubbock) with a bad lifelong cotton farming habit. He’d head out from his homestead to the high school for Gid Night Lights to voluntarily tutor us in algebra on Mondays and Thursdays, so we could play under the Friday Night Lights.

Children, even deviant teenagers like I was, know goodness when they see it. When I first think of Gid, I don’t picture him physically; I think of his heart. The physical trait I most remember is the big dent on his forehead that shone in the lights of Ms. Hardin’s classroom.

Bettie Hardin was a petite, put-together woman — pristine white perm, horn-rimmed glasses, mock turtleneck. She played the Methodist piano every Sunday morning with the same precision she expected from our math during the week.

Sports were our world. And Ms. Hardin could end that world with the swipe of a red pen.

But Gid came to the rescue, helping us understand it all. The first time I figured out ratio and proportion equations, Gid was right there, two huge knuckles on the desk behind me, affirming and encouraging me as my mind translated through pencil what Hardin and he had worked so hard to cultivate. When the problem was solved, the huge knuckles rose above the suspenders past the dent and to the lights, “Good, golly. You got it.”

I don’t today use an acquired high school skill — from on or off the field — more frequently than that equation.

Sitting in Wayne Riley’s 6th Grade Sunday School with half a dozen others was the first time I ever first-hand witnessed a grown man weep; we’d know him later as Coach Riley, our varsity basketball coach.

When my grandmother passed, I was destroyed and my band teacher Harold Bufe took a knee and consoled me about the loss of my world and his longtime friend.

When Gid died, many of us learned what we didn’t know all along: he’d been rescuing people for a long time. He led the 317th Regiment, 80th Infantry Division up Utah Beach where dented-head man earned, but later refused, a Purple Heart. Too many missing human variables under his command for him to accept such an award.

Public education gave us a tutor who defeated Hitler, coaches who earned our respect, and band teachers who helped us outside the notes. And Ms. Hardin who played Amazing Grace as the soundtrack.

My story isn’t uncommon, which is the point.

We’ll vote against ourselves on a myriad of issues, but not our schools.

Add to it all, rural folks know a little grammar as well.

“Choice” is a political synonym for “consolidation” and “consolidation” is another way of saying “closing” our communities — and our organists, Purple Hearts, and Sunday school teachers.

The political math for Abbott and statewide Republicans is they desperately need rural Texas votes to overcome deficits in the likes of Dallas, Tarrant, Travis, and Harris Counties. Their campaign commercials running longer loops every four years are evidence.

And while Oltons, Borgers, Ballingers, Floydadas, Abernathys, and the 85% of Texas geography won’t become Beto O’Rourke Country anytime soon, if ever, these places might just not vote.

Pull the lever, do your duty, get the sticker, but leave the gubernatorial box left open.

The collective rural Republican state representative silence on the governor’s initiative is already telling. Silence from electeds who backed Abbott’s $118 million for pre-K public education funding in 2015, only to have Abbott abdicate in subsequent far-right primary challenges.

Mr. O’Rourke may well come for some of our guns, but that’s highly unlikely with a legislative and judicial GOP stronghold.

But Abbott’s open threat is against the lifeblood of our communities: our schools. And he’s making it with a three-branch majority.

That’s Abbott’s math now. And Gid’s currently unavailable to tutor.

Jay Leeson is a freelance writer and artist in Lubbock. He wrote and illustrated this for The Dallas Morning News.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Republicans, Rural Schools, Supporting public schools, Texas

Tom Ultican Reports on the Highlights of the #NPE2022 Conference in Philly

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
1

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, is now a significant chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement. He attended the recent national conference of the Network for Public Education in Philadelphia and recapitulates the excitement we shared at being in person after a 2-year hiatus.

After every conference, attendees say, “This was the best one yet.” They enjoy meeting people who are doing the same work to fight privatization of their public schools. By the end of the conference, attendees say they feel energized, hopeful, and happy to know that they are not alone.

I urge you to read Tom’s post. You will get a sense of the embarrassment of riches available to attendees.

I should add that the Nebraska Save Our Schools group shared the Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Activism. Nebraska is one of the few states that has managed to protect its public schools and keep out both charters and vouchers, despite being a Red State.

The Pastors for Texas Children, a co-winner of the award, has repeatedly blocked vouchers in the Texas Legislature and has consistently fought for funding for public schools. PTC has opened chapters in other Red states, where they mobilize clergy to support public schools.

A high point for me was interviewing “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, a legendary rock star and actor (“The Sopranos”), who is dedicated to getting the arts into schools, not as an extra, but across the curriculum. we had a wonderful conversation. He has funded lesson plans based on rock and roll, available free at his website TeachRock.

All of the general sessions were taped. I will post them when they become available.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Courage, Creativity, Dark Money, Democracy, Detroit, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, For-Profit, Hope, Innovation, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Nevada, Philadelphia, Privatization, Racism, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Supporting public schools, Teachers

The Founders Wanted Public Schools, Not Charter Schools or Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2022 //
6

This is “national charter school week,” aka “national school privatization week.” The charter lobby—the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools—has been fighting furiously to block proposed regulations by the U.S. Department of Education that would ban federal funding of for-profit charter schools and white-flight charters. They have received sympathetic editorials, repeating the falsehoods that these sensible regulations would harm all charter schools (they won’t). Their ads are even on national television (I saw one last night on a cable news station), falsely claiming that the regulations are a direct attack on charter schools (they are not).

Who knew that the charter trade association would resort to outright lies to protect low-quality for-profit charter operators and keep federal funding available to open new white-flight charters? The regulations have zero effect on existing charters. They affect only the federal funding spent to open new charters, $440 million a year, which has been recklessly spent on for-profit chains and on charters that never opened or closed soon after opening. Why waste federal money on grifters and entrepreneurs?

By their lies, you shall know them.

The charter movement is heavily subsidized by billionaires and supported by public school haters like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos. A few Democratic Senators sent a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona opposing the regulations that would ban for-profit charters and white-flight charters, including Cory Booker, Michael Bennett, and Dianne Feinstein. Shame on them.

The origins of school choice are well-known: resistance to the Brown decision. Derek Black in his great book Schoolhouse Burning established beyond doubt that the Founding Fathers anticipated the establishment of public schools when they wrote the Northwest Ordinances, which required new states to set aside a plot of land in every town for a public school.

A reader who calls him/herself Democracy posted the following comment:

As I’ve noted more than once previously, the Founders were advocates of PUBLIC education as the means to promote the common good, and democratic citizenship. It – the idea that public schools should teach democratic citizenship – stretches back to Aristotle:

In Book 8 of Politics, Aristotle explained the importance of public education to democratic governance. He points out the different foundational ethos of governments:

“the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.”

It’s worth repeating: “…the better the character, the better the government.”

What occurred from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021 was a steep and marked absence of democratic character in the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.

In fact, the Founders created the constitutional structure for a democratic society “in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They adopted John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the reason people CREATE government –– is to protect their persons through, as historian R. Freeman Butts put it, a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.”

The goal, then, was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.” Public education was part and parcel of social contract, helping to develop and maintain the common good.

It’s precisely because of the importance of public schooling to civic education and democratic citizenship that Aristotle concluded this:

“education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”

That’s worth repeating too: “…the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”

The democratic social contract – the guts of the American Republic – was under continued assault from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021, and was under DIRECT attack on January 6, 2021. Republican elected officials of all stripes, and Republican voters, were responsible. They refuse to take any personal responsibility; they try to evade and avoid accountability; and they redirected their efforts to undermine democratic values.

The current proxy is public schooling. At its core, the offensive against public education is an assault on democratic character and values, on the rule of law, and on equality and “liberty and justice for all.” And at its core, it relies on an ugly racism that casts whites as “the victims.”

The attack on public schools is NOT some spontaneous “parent rights” outburst. It’s orchestrated. It’s being funded and set into motion by right-wing “Christians” at the Council for National Policy, a far-right group that had tremendous influence with the Trump administration. Richard DeVos, husband of Betsy, has been president of CNP, twice. Ed Meese, who helped Reagan cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, has been president of CNP. So has Pat Robertson. And Tim LaHaye.

Current and former CNP members include Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who was on that call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding that he find Trump more than 11,780 votes, and Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA who bragged about bussing tens of thousands of people to the January 6th ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and insurrection. Two of the top people at the Federalist Society, Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo, are also CNP members. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a member.

You can read about Ginni Thomas here:

“The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left’… on January 6, 2021 she cheered on the supporters of Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election…”

You can read about Betsy DeVos here:

Right-winger Milton Friedman argued for returning to a pre-Aristotle era of schooling, saying, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education.”

That’s what Republicans are dedicated to; destroying public schools, and stealing their funding.

My addendum: if they destroy our public schools, they will destroy public libraries, public lands, the right to vote and, in time, our democracy.

Categories History, Privatization, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers
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