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Cameron Vickrey: No to Chaplains in School!

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2024 //
41

Cameron Vickrey is a pastor in Texas who works as communications director for Fellowship Southwest. Her father was a pastor, her husband is a pastor, and she believes in public schools. This idea of adding pastors as mental health counselors is catching on in the South. At the moment, the Florida legislature is discussing the idea, as are other states. It’s one more way to erode the line between church and state. Will schools have pastors for every sect? Imams? Rabbis? What about the students who are atheists? Will they be denied counseling?

Cameron Vickrey wrote against this idea for the San Antonio Express-News

The deadline looms. Every public school district in Texas has been given until March 1 to choose between what seems to be two options for the role of chaplains in their  schools. 

But many are finding their way forward with a third way. This third way might at first seem like a people-pleasing, nondecision that avoids conflict and ignores the issue, but there’s wisdom in it.

In the regular session of the Texas Legislature last spring, lawmakers made several attempts to incorporate additional religious expression into public schools. Most of those efforts, like posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and instituting a period for prayer and Bible study, failed. But SB 763 became law.

The chaplain bill, as it is known, requires school districts to choose whether they will allow paid or volunteer chaplains to serve students in public schools.

The National School Chaplain Association advocated for this legislation to fill a self-proclaimed need for more counselors in public schools to meet the mental health needs of students.

Not coincidentally, the leader of this association runs another organization,  Mission Generation. Mission Generation hopes to have 100 million people in discipleship with Jesus Christ by 2025 by offering school chaplain programs in public schools. So while it’s clearly not a way to meet mental health needs, at least not a safe way, it may very well be a way to turn schools into mission fields.

With all the political rhetoric about public schools being godless or hostile to religion, you might be surprised at how much leeway is given for religious expression.

So, back to our options, which  conventionally have been viewed as two: Either, yes, we will allow paid and/or volunteer chaplains to serve as counselors;  or, no, we will not. The Legislature is forcing school boards to take sides, inviting  further polarization. It sets the stage for activists to enter school districts and accuse board members on either side of the issue of bending to political will.

Under the Constitution, students are free to pray in school. They can wear religious clothing and accessories. They can share their faith with other students. They can read Scripture. Teachers, too, can discuss religion in class from an academic or objective perspective. And religious groups have the right to meet on campus outside of school.

There will be a public record of how each trustee of Texas’s 1,200 districts voted. Which side will they choose? Will they go on record supporting evangelistic efforts in public schools or not? It’s a political pickle.

Enter the third way: Avoid taking sides by passing a resolution affirming a current volunteer policy that doesn’t discriminate against chaplains.

My initial beef with this option is rooted in these districts’ unwillingness to stop the intrusion of religious influence into public schools. But I’m starting to like it. Finding a workaround to the Legislature’s demands is deliciously subversive. By refusing to play their game, these school boards are protecting their districts from political polarization, which is the biggest problem facing public education today.

I heartily commend those school boards that have rejected SB 763, including a majority of those in Bexar County. These districts have made sure the religious liberty of all students will continue to be protected from those who confuse schools with churches.

My kids’ district, North East ISD, has not yet voted. It is in an interesting position since the passing of trustee Terri Williams last fall has resulted in the potential for an evenly split vote. I urge the NEISD school board to protect our students from religious overreach. I believe they will, whether that comes in the form of a complete rejection of SB 763 or the subversive third way.

And if I’m totally surprised and they approve a chaplaincy program, well, that’s what elections are for.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

Texas Monthly: The Billionaire Bully Who Wants Texas to be a Theocracy

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2024 //
26

Texas has several billionaire bullies who want the state to keep their taxes low, cut benefits to needy people, and enact vouchers so that more students can attend religious schools on the public’s dime.

Russell Gold writes in the Texas Monthly about Tim Dunn, a billionaire who has used his money to purge the Republican Party of moderates. In addition to being an oilman, Tim Dunn is a pastor and a devout Christian nationalist. He has funded numerous organizations that act as pass-throughs for his political contributions, such as Defend Texas Liberty PAC, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the First Liberty Institute, Empower Texans, Texas Scorecard, Ballotpedia, Stand for Freedom PAC,

Gold writes:

You may not think about Tim Dunn. Indeed, unless you’re a close observer of Texas politics, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him. But Dunn thinks a lot about you.

For two decades he has been quietly, methodically, and patiently building a political machine that has pushed Texas forcefully to the right, sending more and more members of the centrist wing of the Republican Party into exile. A 68-year-old oil billionaire, Dunn seeks to transform Texas into something resembling a theocracy. If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook. If you question why Texas’s elected officials no longer represent the majority of Texans’ views, the reason can be traced to the tactics employed by Dunn and the many organizations and politicians he funds and influences. He has built his own caucus within the Legislature that is financially beholden to him. And despite his Sunday school pleas for comity, Dunn has deepened Texas’s political divisions: there are the Democrats and what remains of the mainstream conservative Republican Party. And then there are Dunn and his allies….

In the past two years Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far. Until recently his main tool for exerting influence has been the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, to which he has given at least $9.85 million since the beginning of 2022. This is nearly all the money he contributed to Texas races over that span and the majority raised by the committee. The political action committee targets Republicans, many of them quite conservative, whom it deems insufficiently loyal to the organization’s right-wing agenda. Dunn is not a passive donor who will dole out a few thousand dollars after a phone call and some flattering chitchat. The funding machine he has built is designed to steer politics and control politicians. 

Its methods are deceptively simple. A Dunn-affiliated organization lets lawmakers know how it wants them to vote on key issues of the legislative session. After the session, it assigns a number, from zero to one hundred, to each lawmaker based on these votes. Republicans who score high, in the eighties or nineties, are likely to remain in Dunn’s good graces. But those who see their scores drift down to the seventies or even sixties—who, in other words, legislate independently? Their fate is easy to predict. 

They’ll likely face a primary opponent, often someone little known in the community, whose campaign bank account is filled by donations from Dunn and his allies. This cash provides access to political consultants and operations that can be used to spread false and misleading attacks on Dunn’s targets, via social media feeds, glossy mailers, and text messages. “They told you point blank: if you don’t vote the way we tell you, we’re going to score against you,” said Bennett Ratliff, a Republican former state representative from Dallas County. “And if you don’t make a good score, we’re going to run against you. It was not a thumb on the scale—it was flat extortion.” Ratliff lost in 2014 to a Dunn-backed right-wing candidate, Matt Rinaldi, who scored a perfect one hundred in the next two sessions and quickly amassed power: Rinaldi now serves as the combative and divisive chair of the state GOP…

Dunn’s influence goes well beyond campaigns and politics. His résumé is lengthy. He is vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank located a couple of blocks south of the Capitol. TPPF generates policy proposals—from severe property tax cuts to bills that impede the growth of renewable energy—that are often taken up by the Texas Legislature and emulated in other red states. He has served for years on the board of the First Liberty Institute, a legal powerhouse that has won Supreme Court cases to advance Christianity’s role in public life. ..

In the past several years Dunn has become involved with multiple online media operations. “You can’t trust the newspapers,” he wrote in a 2018 letter to voters. But apparently you can trust Texas Scorecard, a political website that is often critical of politicians who don’t support his agenda. Texas Scorecard was published by Empower Texans, a group largely funded by Dunn that then became a separate organization in 2020. It continues to publish articles that are generally critical of candidates Dunn opposes.

He has also been an officer with Chicago-based Pipeline Media, which maintains a network of websites designed to look like independent local media outlets but that churn out often-partisan articles that amplify stances taken by special interest groups. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that this network has attacked renewable energy and advocated for property tax cuts. Further, Dunn is a longtime board member of the Lucy Burns Institute, publisher of the website Ballotpedia, which provides information on federal, state, and local elections. It recently launched an “ultra-local” initiative, publishing updates on candidate positions and endorsements in areas that have become news deserts after the closures of local newspapers. The site reported more than a quarter billion page views in 2022…

Dunn has a few key powerful officials in his pocket, including Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (a job considered more powerful than the governor) and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who escaped an effort to impeach him thanks to Dunn’s largesse.

Dunn is up-front about his desire to use politics to pave the way for a “New Earth,” in which Jesus Christ and his believers will live together. (“When heaven comes to earth and God dwells with his people as the King,” Dunn has said.) Until then, he remains a key player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects the importance of pluralism to American identity. Instead it contends that only devout Christians are good Americans. 

Back in 2010, Dunn met with Joe Strauss, the Republican Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. Strauss represented San Antonio. He is Jewish. Dunn told Strauss that only Christians should be in leadership roles.

Considering that Jesus was Jewish, that’s not a very Christ-like sentiment. Unless you are a Christian nationalist.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Religion, Texas, Vouchers

Houston: Principal Turnover Hits 20% After State Takeover

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2024 //
47

The Houston Chronicle reports an acceleration in principal turnover since the state took over control of the Houston Independent School District and placed non-educator Mike Miles in charge. The principals of nearly 60 schools have resigned or been removed. A military man, Miles was “trained” by the Broad Superintendents Academy. He is imposing standardized curriculum and instruction across the schools he directly controls (called the “New Education System”).

Even the principal of an A-rated school lost his job.

The memos came in one after the other, a laundry list of grievances listing all the ways Federico Hernandez was supposedly failing as principal of Houston ISD’s Middle College High School.

A teacher used Post-It notes rather than index cards during a lesson, according to one complaint from Hernandez’s supervisor. Others allowed students to sit in the back of a classroom or kept a light off during class. Some implemented multiple response strategies, “but not correctly,” read the memo shared with the Houston Chronicle.

Even though the campus run on Houston Community College’s Felix Fraga campus boasts an A-rated academic performance, those were among the infractions that got Hernandez removed from his job less than two months into the school year.

He is one of at least 58 principals who left their schools, involuntarily or otherwise, in 2023 since Superintendent Mike Miles was appointed to his post by the Texas Education Agency on June 1, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of HISD staffing records. After taking into account schools that share a principal, such as Jane Long Academy and Las Americas Newcomer School, or those that recorded multiple changes between June and December, such as Madison High School, the Chronicle confirmed there have been at least 61 leadership changes across 59 campuses…

Erica Harbatkin, an education policy expert at Florida State University who studies principal turnover, said it is not unusual for administrators to reassign principals in an attempt to shake up under-performing schools. They typically don’t do so during the school year, though, because principals need time to plan and coordinate their staff, and “coming in after the school year started… obviously undermines some of those strategies.”

Harbatkin said replacing a principal is one of the quickest ways to effect change at a school, for better or worse.

“The theory of action behind more contemporary school turnaround and improvement policy is that these schools are in this pattern of low performance, and they need something to get them out, some sort of big external shock … and one of the ways that happens is through replacing the principal,” Harbatkin said.

If not done carefully, however, principal turnover can lead to negative effects on student achievement, Harbatkin said. Her research found that principal turnover “is associated with lower test scores, school proficiency rates, and teacher retention.”

“When principals turn over teachers tend to turn over as well, and if that turnover is not well-planned, if there’s not good distributed leadership in the school or someone who can step into the role, that’s likely to make those negative effects even larger,” Harbatkin said.

No one explained the theory or rationale for removing a principal from a high-performing school. Maybe he failed to comply with an order…

Ebony Cumby, who served as principal at Askew Elementary in west Houston for 12 years, resigned within a week of Miles’ appointment after sitting through the first couple days of principal meetings.

“Throughout that period, there were things that I thought were exciting changes that needed to be made in the district, and there were other things that I could foresee being problematic, especially for a district as large as HISD,” Cumby said.

Cumby said she appreciated Miles’ attempts to “bring more consistency” to the district by standardizing the curriculum and other elements, but she was put off by what she described as “a cookie-cutter way of teaching” that she would be expected to enforce. After over two decades at HISD, she ended up leaving public education altogether for another industry.

“I noticed early on that there were things in place that, whether it was intentional or not, were going to take autonomy away from teachers and require them to conform to a certain way of doing things and really take away their creativity, which as a principal was a big deal to me,” Cumby said. “To kind of hear that its ‘our way or the highway’ did not sit well with me.”

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Disruption, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Principals, Texas

Texas: Federal Court Overturns Law Forcing Bookstores to Review Books They Sell to Schools

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2024 //
7

Last May, I wrote about a punitive law in Texas that terrified the state’s 300 or so independent bookstores. The law, House Bill 900, required bookstores to rate every book they sold—now and in the past— to school libraries.

The bookstores sued to overturn to the law, arguing that the administrative burden of complying would put most of them out of business.

Their suit succeeded at the District Court level. Then it advanced to the very conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the plaintiffs were fearful. [A sign of the times: Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the federal courts were constantly challenged to enforce the Brown decision of 1954, the Fifth Circuit was considered highly liberal in facing down segregationists.]

But to the delight of the booksellers, the Fifth Circuit sided with them.

The Texas Monthly reported:

The lawsuit, which was filed by Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop and Austin-based BookPeople, along with a group of free speech organizations, argued that HB 900’s requirement essentially compelled the private businesses to engage in speech by requiring them to create a rating system for the materials they sold.

…the Fifth Circuit issued an uncommon ruling against the state, rejecting arguments from the Texas Education Agency—the suit’s lead defendant—that claimed that requiring booksellers to rate books was a mere administrative task. “This process is highly discretionary and is neither precise nor certain,” the court’s opinion read. “The statute requires vendors to undertake contextual analyses, weighing and balancing many factors to determine a rating for each book,” a process the opinion said was “anything but the mere disclosure of factual information.”

The plaintiffs had several issues with the law—tasking short-staffed booksellers with reading every single book any customer wanted to order would be an impossible task, for instance—but, according to Blue Willow owner Valerie Koehler, the real sticking point was being required by law to offer opinions on the contents of the books she sold. “I think common sense has prevailed,” she told Texas Monthly. “It’s not really up to the vendor to rate these books, where they’re compelling us to rate a book that they could then say, ‘No, that’s not a good rating.’ They were making us take a stand, and then were still in charge of whether our standards were right or not.”

The future of the law is still undecided—representatives from the office of the attorney general and the Texas Education Agency did not return requests for interviews—but the state would face an uphill battle with the Supreme Court after losing at the typically reliable Fifth Circuit. Koehler is accordingly optimistic—and reflective—about the struggle.

“We’ve never said, ‘We’re not going to carry that book because we don’t believe in it.’ We’ll carry it on our shelves if we think someone is going to come in and ask for it. That’s what we do as a business,” she said. “I didn’t take a stand against Greg Abbott; I took a stand as a business, for common sense, and my First Amendment rights as a bookseller.”

Categories Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Ignorance, Literacy, Literature, Texas

Uvalde Report: A Failure of Leadership

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2024 //
24

The Justice Department recently released a lengthy report on the massacre of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022.

The report concluded that teachers and students have more training about how to react to an active shooter than the nearly 400 law enforcement officers who converged on the school. No one was sure who was in charge. The children had been trained to be silent, and they were. The officers assumed that the silence meant that the shooter was barricaded in an empty classroom, despite numerous 911 calls by terrified students. For over an hour, no one confronted the killer. The mistakes cost lives. When the killer was dead, the medical response to the situation was bizarre. Dead children were placed in ambulances, while children with gunshot wounds were loaded onto school buses.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune published and summarized the findings:

UVALDE, Texas — Law enforcement agencies across the country should immediately prioritize active shooter training, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday as he released a scathing report about the handling of the 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which lives could have been saved if training protocols had been followed.

The Justice Department’s long-anticipated report about the shooting found that “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” led to the bungled response, which Garland said should never have happened. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed on May 24, 2022.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” Garland said during a news conference on Thursday.

The report’s findings about the failure to follow protocol and the lack of sufficient training to prepare officers for a mass shooting largely mirrored the flaws revealed in a Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation published last month that found that states require students and teachers to receive far more training to prepare them for a mass shooting than they require for the police. At least 37 states require schools to conduct active-shooter-related drills, nearly all on an annual basis. But Texas is the only state that mandates that all of its police officers complete repeated training, at least 16 hours every two years. That requirement was implemented after the Uvalde shooting.

Garland said the report was produced in an effort to offer lessons that would hopefully better prepare law enforcement across the country to respond to future mass shootings. It offered recommendations that included requiring all agencies in a region to train together and providing officers across the country with at least eight hours of active shooter training annually.

The vast majority of at least 380 officers from about two dozen local, state and federal agencies who responded to the school had never trained together, “contributing to difficulties in coordination and communication,” the report stated.

“Our children deserve better than to grow up in a country where an 18-year-old has easy access to a weapon that belongs on the battlefield, not in a classroom,” Garland said. “And communities across the country, and the law enforcement officers who protect them, deserve better than to be forced to respond to one horrific mass shooting after another. But that is the terrible reality that we face. And so it is the reality that every law enforcement agency in every community across the country must be prepared for.”

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said in an interview that he appreciates the emphasis the Department of Justice placed on widespread active-shooter training. Still, Canady said he is frustrated that leaders have not already learned that “25-year-old lesson” after the shootings at Columbine High, Sandy Hook Elementary and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Since the 1999 Columbine shooting, law enforcement officers have been trained to prioritize stopping the shooter. The report stated that everything else, including officer safety, should be secondary, adding that efforts to engage the shooter “must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available.”

“We’ve got to understand what the priorities are and, quite frankly, I see there are not a lot of priorities greater than keeping students safe at school,” Canady said.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter Lexi was killed in the shooting, said she hopes the report’s findings lead to action, that “the failures end today and that local officials do what wasn’t done that day, do right by the victims and survivors of Robb Elementary: terminations, criminal prosecutions and that our state and federal government enacts sensible gun laws…”

The district attorney and the Texas Department of Public Safety have fought the release of records related to the shooting, prompting news organizations, including ProPublica and the Tribune, to sue. A Travis County district judge ruled in the newsrooms’ favor last month, but DPS appealed. The agency did not respond to requests for comment about the Justice Department’s report.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who initially praised the response and later said he was misled, released a statement thanking the Justice Department. He said the state has already adopted some of the recommended measures and would review others.

The report, which offers the most comprehensive account to date from authorities about the shooting, echoes many findings from a probe released by a state House committee two months after the shooting…

The report noted that the “misguided and misleading narratives, leaks, and lack of communication about what happened on May 24 is unprecedented and has had an extensive, negative impact on the mental health and recovery of the family members and other victims, as well as the entire community of Uvalde.”

The previous mayor of Uvalde requested the federal review days after the shooting when it became clear that the response was flawed. The review was led in part by Sheriff John Mina of Orange County, Florida, who was the incident commander during the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando.

An outside review of that incident found that Florida officers, who waited three hours to take down the shooter, mostly followed best practices, although it stated that the law enforcement agencies in Orlando should update their training and policies.

In multiple after-action reviews, including the Pulse report, authors opted not to criticize significant law enforcement delays during mass shootings, according to an analysis of more than three dozen of these reports by ProPublica, the Tribune and FRONTLINE.

The Uvalde report was far more critical, finding failures in leadership, command and coordination.

It stated that officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect incident instead of one in which a shooter was an active threat to children and teachers. Officers should “never” treat an active shooter with access to victims as a barricaded suspect — especially in a school, where there is a “high probability” of potential victims and innocent civilians being present, the report stated.

Officers had multiple indicators that should have made it clear they were facing an active shooter, including 911 calls from children and teachers pleading for help, a dispatcher’s announcement minutes after officers arrived that students were likely in the classroom with the shooter, and an Uvalde school police officer announcing that his wife had called to tell him she had been shot, according to the report.

Gupta condemned the medical response, saying that after police breached the classroom and killed the gunman, dead victims were placed in ambulances while children with bullet wounds were put on school buses. Many of those findings were revealed in a 2022 investigation by the Tribune, ProPublica and The Washington Post that determined medical responders did not know who was in charge and that two students and a teacher who later died still had a pulse when they were rescued from the school.

In its blistering criticism of responding officers, the report said that supervisors from various law enforcement agencies “demonstrated no urgency” in taking control of the incident, which exacerbated communication problems and added to overall confusion.

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was listed as the incident commander in the district’s active-shooter plan, had the “necessary authority, training and tools” to lead the response but did not provide “appropriate leadership, command and control,” the report found. Arredondo could not be reached for comment Thursday through his attorney. He has previously defended his actions and those of others involved in the response.

Beyond that, no leader from any of the other responding agencies “effectively questioned the decisions and lack of urgency” demonstrated by Arredondo and Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas, who both arrived at the school within minutes of the first round of gunfire. The report listed Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco, Uvalde County Constables Emmanuel Zamora and Johnny Field, and an unidentified Texas Ranger as examples of such leaders.

“Responding officers here in Uvalde, who also lost loved ones and who still bear the emotional scars of that day, deserved the kind of leadership and training that would have prepared them to do the work that was required,” Garland said.

The report also found that key officers, including Pargas, had no active shooter or incident command training despite, in some instances, having decades of law enforcement experience. Nolasco, the sheriff, also had no active shooter training and “minimal” incident command training.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Failure, Guns, Texas

Texas: Gov. Abbott Says He Will Defy Supreme Court Decision on Border Control

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2024 //
41

As you know, Governor Abbott of Texas placed the Texas National Guard in control of the international border which is the Rio Grande River, where immigrants have been wading or swimming across. The Texas Guard refused to allow the U.S. Border Patrol to enter the section they control near Eagle Pass, Texas. Recently a woman and her two small children drowned in the section patrolled by the state.

The Biden administration sued the state to recognize the supremacy of federal law. The federal district court agreed with the feds. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the state. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for the federal government.

Now Governor Abbott says he will ignore the Supreme Court because the state is facing an “invasion.”

The PBS Newshour invited a notable constitutional lawyer, Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas, to discuss the issues.

I’m not a lawyer but it seems to me that the issue of states’ rights was settled in 1865.

Meanwhile, Governor Abbott is scoring lots of points for defying the federal government and the Supreme Court. Texas has a small but loud minority that wants to secede from the U.S.

Abbott wants a confrontation with the federal government. Biden will have to stand up to Abbott’s grandstanding while taking a strong position on securing the border.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, History, Texas

Texas: More than 26,000 Babies Born to Victims of Rape

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2024 //
45

The Houston Chronicle reported on a study that showed one of the consequences of a state law that does not permit women who are the victims of rape or incest to obtain an abortion. In addition, teen births rose for the first time in 15 years.

Texas saw an estimated 26,313 rape-related pregnancies during the 16 months after the state outlawed all abortions, with no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest, according to a study published Wednesdayin the Journal of the American Medical Association.

That’s the highest figure among the 14 states with total abortion bans, with Texas having the largest population, according to the study.

“Survivors who need abortion care should not have their reproductive autonomy further undermined by state policy,” said one of the authors, Dr. Kari White, of the Texas-based Resound Research for Reproductive Health…

Following the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, the researchers estimated there were 519,981 rapes associated with 64,565 pregnancies during the four to 18 months after states implemented total abortion bans. Of those pregnancies, an estimated 5,586 occurred in states with exceptions for rape and 58,979 in states with no exceptions.

Of the five states with rape exceptions, strict gestational limits and requirements to report the rape to law enforcement make it harder for most survivors to qualify, the study said. There were 10 or fewer legal abortions per month in the five states with rape exceptions, the study said, indicating that survivors with access to abortion care still cannot receive it in their home state…

Behind Texas, the states with the highest totals were Missouri (5,825), Tennessee (4,990), Arkansas (4,660), Oklahoma (4,530), Louisiana (4,290) and Alabama (4,130).

As a woman and a mother, I cannot understand a law requiring a woman to bear her rapist’s baby. The child would be a daily reminder of a terrible act of violence. I know what my decision would be. Other women may feel differently. Each woman in that situation should be allowed to decide what to do.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Gender, Health, Texas

Surprise! Supreme Court Supports Biden in Case About Texas’s Border Razor Wire

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2024 //
71

In a decision that was a happy surprise, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration’s view that federal law controls international borders, not state law.

The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett voting with the three liberal justices.

Governor Greg Abbott ordered that razor wire and buoys be strung across the Rio Grand at locations where migrants were crossing from Mexico to Texas. The U.S. Botder Patrol was blocked by the Texas National Guard, which took control of policing the border. Three migrants, a woman and her two young children, drowned while the Texas National Guard watched and prevented the Border Patrol from rendering assistance.

The Biden administration sued the state of Texas, asserting the primacy of federal law. The federal district court ruled in favor of the federal government. Texas appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the nation, which ruled in favor of Texas. Many legal scholars thought that ruling was bizarre.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government and against Texas, meaning that the U.S. Border Patrol will resume their duties. This decision is a knock on the secessionist inclinations of far-right firebrand Greg Abbott and the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

This decision knocked down the claim that state law could override federal law and that a state on the international border could take control.

What’s truly shocking is that four justices were willing to give states the authority to overrule federal law. Shades of 1860!

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Texas

Texas: When Billionaires Fund the News….

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2024 //
6

This story by Michael Hardy was published by the Texas Monthly. It goes to the heart of serious problems in today’s journalism: is the Internet destroying the audience for daily newspapers? Can daily newspapers survive? The Baltimore Sun was just purchased by the rightwing Sinclair Network, which already owns a large number of local radio stations. Can newspapers be independent when they are owned by billionaires with a political agenda?

Billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post but he doesn’t seem to have imposed his political views on the newspaper. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch famously bought The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News. He has pushed his properties to match his politics.

The Los Angeles Times was purchased by a billionaire doctor, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, in 2018. He has not imposed his politics, but he has ordered drastic layoffs in newsroom personnel, which led to a one-day walkout last Friday by the newsroom guild, the first such work stoppage in the newspaper’s 142-year history. The pending layoffs would be the third round of cuts since June.

This is not a good sign for the health of our democracy.

The death of major newspapers over the past few decades has created “news deserts,” regions where there are no newspapers. It is more important than ever to support local journalism, which provide the sole source of information about local events, school board elections and meetings, elections, and local government.

Into the gap comes a new form of journalism, the nonprofit newspaper. Most such enterprises are supported by subscribers, advertisers, and foundation gifts. I support the Mississippi Free Press, which does an amazing job of covering news in the state. I also support the Texas Observer, which is a low-budget newspaper whose scrappy staff is known for investigative journalism. (I also subscribe to The Texas Tribune and The Texas Monthly).

In some cases, even the nonprofits depend on billionaires to keep them afloat. As this story shows, relying on billionaires can be hazardous. In some cases, their gifts come with long strings attached.

In a recent issue of The Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy reported what happened to a new nonprofit journal called the Houston Landung.

In its mission statement, the nonprofit Houston Landing describes itself as an “independent, nonpartisan news organization devoted to public service journalism,” one that “offer[s] solutions to pressing problems” and “holds the powerful accountable.” Its stories are free to read, and its website runs no ads or clickbait. Its vision of an independent, well-funded outlet built on rigorous investigative reporting attracted some of the city’s brightest journalism stars after its soft launch two years ago with financial backing from the philanthropic American Journalism Project and Houston billionaires John Arnold and Richard Kinder.

Among its first hires were Houston Chronicle investigations editor Mizanur Rahman, who became the Landing’s editor in chief (and helped write the mission statement), and the Chronicle’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Alex Stuckey, who became the Landing’s top investigative journalist. Rahman and Stuckey helped build a newsroom of about thirty editors, reporters, photographers, and web designers that routinely punched above its weight, producing major stories about an epidemic of deaths in Harris County jails and a plague of stopped trains in Houston’s East End. Since the website’s official debut in June, it has regularly scooped the competition—including Texas Monthly—on stories ranging from the state takeover of Houston ISD to predatory lending at the Colony Ridge development north of Houston.

The Landing’s success made it all the more shocking when, on Monday morning, Rahman and Stuckey were summarily fired by CEO Peter Bhatia, a fifty-year newspaper veteran and former Detroit Free Press editor in chief who had been in the job for less than a year. Bhatia is longtime friends with Landing board member Jeff Cohen, a senior advisor at Houston philanthropy organization Arnold Ventures—a major funder of the Landing—and a former Chronicle editor in chief. The six-member board of directors appears to have brought Bhatia in to shake things up at the website. (None of the Landing’s six board members agreed to interview requests for this story; the author of this story worked briefly under Cohen at the Chronicle in 2017 and did sporadic freelance copy writing for the Arnold Ventures website from 2019 to 2020.)

“Over recent months I’ve become concerned about whether or not we were fully engaged in the process of being effective in the digital spaces,” Bhatia told Texas Monthly this week. “We’ve been putting out a newspaper on a website. There’s been some really good journalism and some high-impact stuff, for sure. But after a lot of conversations with Mizanur, I reached the conclusion that we had to make a change if we’re going to be as effective as we can in the digital space.” A document prepared for the November meeting of the Landing’s board and obtained by Texas Monthly showed that the site exceeded its 2023 goal for annual page views (1.5 million) and was within striking distance of its goal for unique visitors (1 million). For comparison, the nonprofit San Antonio Report, founded in 2012, claims 500,000 monthly page views.

Stuckey told Texas Monthly that she was blindsided by her firing. Just two weeks earlier, she had received a glowing performance review and a 3 percent pay raise. In a recording of Monday’s termination meeting provided by Stuckey, Bhatia can be heard saying he has “enormous respect for you as a journalist . . . you are an investigative reporter of the highest level.” But, he explains, there is no place for her in the “comprehensive reset” he believes is necessary at the Landing.

“If you had ever come to me and said, ‘I want you to revamp how you do stories,’ I would have done that in a heartbeat,” Stuckey tells him.

“It’s not my job to do that,” Bhatia replies. “It’s the editor’s job.”

“So I’m getting cut off at the knees because you felt that Mizanur didn’t do that?”

“Well, you can jump to that conclusion.”

At the end of the meeting, human resources director Susie Hermsen offered Stuckey three months of severance pay if she signed a nondisparagement agreement. Stuckey refused. “I believe in transparency,” she can be heard saying in the recording. “This is insanity, and I am absolutely not signing anything.”

The Landing’s newsroom was similarly dumbfounded by the firings. Much of the staff converged upon the organization’s sixth-floor office, in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, on Monday to show solidarity with Rahman and Stuckey. Later, the staff wrote a collective letter to the Landing’s board of directors warning of “significant damage to employee retention and recruitment” and predicting that “the optics of such a massive restructuring during a moment of forward momentum will hurt our fundraising and financial efforts.”

Bhatia acknowledged that the newsroom was in open revolt against his leadership. “I have no illusion that some people are going to leave over this, and I respect that,” he told Texas Monthly. The Landing’s managing editor, John Tedesco, will temporarily take over for Rahman while Bhatia leads a search for a new editor in chief. Tedesco told me that he disagrees with the decision to fire Rahman and Stuckey and fears that “this turmoil will cause our best and brightest journalists to look for the nearest exit ramp.”

The Landing is one of dozens of local nonprofit newsrooms that have sprung up around the country in the past couple of decades. Often funded by a combination of wealthy donors, foundation grants, NPR-style membership drives, and paid events, these nonprofits have been touted as a supplement or even a replacement for declining local newspapers. But some observers worry that such publications are beholden to the whims of their billionaire patrons. (Texas Monthly is a for-profit magazine whose chairman is Houston billionaire Randa Duncan Williams.)

Where did the staff go wrong? Did they write anything critical of charter schools (billionaire John Arnold has poured many millions into promoting charters)? Or did they praise pensions for public service workers (another of Mr. Arnold’s pet peeves)? Or was it something that stepped on the toes of the other billionaire funder, Mr. Kinder? The publication was launched with $20 million, so it would not have been a financial issue.

This is what Thomas Jefferson said about the importance of a free press:

Jefferson believed that a free press was necessary to keep government in check. He wrote that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”:

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Ethics, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Houston, Texas

Texas National Guard Prevents Border Patrol from Saving Drowning Migrants: Three Die. What Would Dr. King Say?

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2024 //
22

Gregg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, is winning the competition among red-state governors to prove that he is the meanest of all. He wants to secure the border but he won’t work with the Biden administration to do it. Now, as a result of his orders, three migrants drowned. Does he have blood on his hands? I wonder if he laughed when he heard about it.

What would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say?

Benjamin Wermund of the Houston Chronicle reported:

WASHINGTON — Three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass Friday night after Texas National Guard soldiers blocked Border Patrol agents from reaching them, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar said Saturday.

BACKGROUND: Texas National Guard blocking Border Patrol from key stretch of Rio Grande, DOJ says

State officials had seized a 2.5-mile stretch of the border earlier this week, an unprecedented state takeover that the Department of Justice says prevents Border Patrol agents from reaching even migrants in need of emergency assistance.

Cuellar said Border Patrol learned Friday night of a group of six migrants in distress as they were trying to cross the Rio Grande near the area. Border Patrol attempted to contact Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety officials to alert them by phone, but were unable to reach them. They then alerted soldiers at the entrance of a public park that the state had fenced off and prevented federal authorities from entering.

“The Texas Military Department and the Texas National Guard did not grant access to Border Patrol agents to save the migrants,” Cuellar wrote on social media. “This is a tragedy and the state bears responsibility.”

The Texas Military Division and Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. Neither did Gov. Greg Abbott’s office. The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection also did not respond to a request for comment.

Cuellar said the Texas National Guard denied Border Patrol entrance, “even in the event of an emergency,” and said they would send state soldiers to investigate. Three bodies were recovered Saturday morning by Mexican authorities, Cuellar said.

Cuellar, who does not represent Eagle Pass, is a Laredo Democrat who has represented a nearby border district for two decades. He is the top Democrat on a House subcommittee overseeing funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Border Patrol.

Open the link to read more.

The Houston Chronicle editorial board thought that Abbott’s behavior was cruel and callous. The editorial board blamed Congress for failing to enact legislation to fix a broken immigration system. No one wants an open border. Abbott was recently interviewed on a rightwing talk show by Dana Loesch, former spokesperson for the NRA, and he boasted that he was doing everything to stop the immigrants except murdering them.

The editorial began:

“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

– Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

That’s our governor talking, folks. Yessir, he’s one tough son of a gun. Or, at least, he sounds like one. We would suggest, though, that he’s not tough at all. We would suggest that he’s a coward, not to mention an ongoing embarrassment to this state.

Despite his big talk, it is a small man who leaches power and satisfaction from the mistreatment and mockery of the vulnerable. It is a small man who refuses to consider the dangerousness of his tough talk and his callous policies. While clumsily evoking the murder of migrants could incite another El Paso massacre, his rogue, unrelenting policing of the border is endangering lives.

Indeed, on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, announcedthat the bodies of three migrants — a woman and two children — were found floating in the Rio Grande near an Eagle Pass park that Texas DPS troopers have seized. Cuellar said Texas authorities wouldn’t grant access to U.S. Border Patrol agents trying to respond to migrants in distress and agreed only to send a soldier to assess the situation.

“This is a tragedy, and the state bears responsibility,” Cuellar said in a statement.

If Abbott fears the criminal penalty for shooting migrants, does he fear any kind of consequences for letting them drown?…

Abbott’s intemperate remarks about guns and shooting people are merely of a piece with his immigration stunts – busing migrants to northern cities, stringing razor wire along the Rio Grande, arresting asylum seekers. The governor is afraid to dig in and look for real solutions to a complex problem — solutions that might mean collaborating with political opponents. When we made a similar criticism of Abbott in a recent editorial, the governor noted on X that we neglected to mention the letter he had hand-delivered to President Biden a year ago in El Paso.

That letter, antagonistic in tone and political in motive, demanded Biden get busy on border wall construction and make pandemic-era immigration policies permanent long after the pandemic ended. It wasn’t about solving anything. It was the same performative politics we’ve come to expect from a self-aggrandizing politician who’s not Texas-tough enough to do what’s right. Or even, at times, what’s human.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil, Texas
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