Webinar: Public Funding for Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2024 //
14

The National Education Policy Center is hosting a webinar on the implications of federal funding of religious schools. Actually, two webinars, on September 26. Sign up here.

NEPC writes:

Should religious schools be publicly funded? And what are the implications when they are?

These questions have become increasingly relevant in the United States in the wake of Espinoza v. Montana (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022), two U.S. Supreme Court cases that forced states, under certain circumstances, to provide public funding to private religious schools. But questions raised by such public funding are not unique to our nation. In fact, many of the issues currently confronting the United States have already been wrestled with in other countries around the world.

On September 26th, two back-to-back webinars will explore these trends and issues, with an eye to helping parents, teachers, administrators, scholars, advocates, journalists, and other education stakeholders better understand the history and impact of state-funded religious education in the U.S. and abroad.

The webinars, which are free to register for and attend, feature the authors of articles in a new special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education, a peer-refereed publication. This special issue on publicly funded religious schools considers research findings around equity, segregation, and discrimination as they relate to state-funded religious education. Studies presented in the special issue were conducted in Canada, Spain, and the U.S., and they examine how state-funded religious education has shifted over time as a result of factors such as legal rulings, politics, demographic changes, global migration, and education privatization.

The webinars are sponsored by NEPC, which invites the public to attend either or both.

Law and Public Discourse is the title of the first webinar in the series, which runs from noon to 1 pm Eastern Time.

Kathleen Sellers of Duke University will moderate. Panelists are Sue Winton of York University in Canada and NEPC Fellows Bruce Baker of the University of Miami, Suzanne Eckes of the University of Wisconsin, Preston Green of the University of Connecticut, and Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado.

The second webinar, Catholic Culture and Market Concerns, will be held right after the first one, from 1 to 2 pm Eastern on September 26th.

Joel Malin of Miami University will moderate. Panelists will be James Coviello, Stephen Kotok, and Catherine DiMartino, all of St. John’s University, Clara Fontdevila of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, Adrián Zancajo and Antoni Verger of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and Ee-Seul Yoon of the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Click here now to register for one or both of these two webinars.

For those interested in reading the underlying articles in the Peabody journal, they’re available (although some are behind a paywall) as follows:

Fontdevila, C., Zancajo, A., & Verger, A. (2024). Catholic Schools in the Marketplace: Changing and Enduring Religious Identities

Green, P., Baker, B., & Eckes, S. (2024). The Potential for Race Discrimination in Voucher Programs in a Post-Carson World

Kotok, S., DiMartino, C.C., & Coviello, J. (2024). New York City Catholic Schools Operating in the Public Space in a Post-Makin World

Welner, K. (2024). Charting the Path to the Outsourcing of Discrimination Through School Choice

Winton, S. (2024). Same Arguments, Different Outcomes: Struggles Over Private School Funding in Alberta and Ontario, Canada

Yoon, E.S. (2024). Unequal City and Inequitable Choice: The Neoliberal State’s Development of School Choice and Marketization in the Publicly Funded Catholic School Board in Toronto, Canada

Yoon, E.S., Malin, J.R., Sellers, K.M., & Welner, K.G. (2024). Should Religious Schools Be Publicly Funded? Issues of Religion, Discrimination, and Equity

Categories Catholic Schools, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state

Timothy Snyder Launches His New Book in Ukraine, Underground

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2024 //
31

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. He specializes in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust.

He wrote this as he was flying from Europe to the U.S. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Snyder has been an outspoken champion of that beleaguered nation. He has used his deep knowledge of history to debunk Putin’s justifications for invading his neighbor. He has even raised money to buy defense weapons for Ukraine when the Republican Congress dithered for months before passing an aid package.

Snyder writes:

Words make their way through the world with us, changing their senses as we change our lives.  Think for example of the word “launch.”

Today and in days to come I will “launch” my book On Freedom, in the sense of the word all of my publishing friends like to use.  They want to book to “launch,” to soar, to do well.  In this spirit I talked to Tom Sutcliffe of the BBC in London this morning, and I am hoping to speak to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC tonight.  And no doubt throughout this long day, which begins in Europe and ends in the United States, I will say “launch” several times myself.

I am returning from Ukraine. My first true conversation about On Freedom this month was a week ago in Kharkiv, a major city in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border and to the front.  The Literary Museum there had invited me for a presentation at an underground site.  It was a lovely place, with a bar that made me the coffee that I needed after a long trip, and a crowd of people invited to talk about freedom (we could not announce the event for safety reasons, which I regret). In a sense, this Kharkiv discussion was the real launch of the book.

We were underground, though, because of another kind of launch, the unmetaphorical kind, not the literary launch but the literal launch — of Russian missiles.

Kharkiv, Budynok “Slovo”.

The Russians seemed close to taking Kharkiv at the beginning of the war.  There was intense combat in Saltivka, a district of the city home to about 600,000 people.  Major buildings in the city center of Kharkiv are still in ruins. The Ukrainians held the Russians back, but Russia itself remains close.  A missile fired from Russia can reach Kharkiv before people have a chance to get underground.  That, in Kharkiv, is what a “launch” too often means.

The difference in the sense of a word can help us to catch the difference in reality.  In Kharkiv, the drones and the bombs and the missiles are a normal part of the day.  People want to talk about books, they want to go to restaurants and movies, they want to live their lives, and they do, despite it all.

Those of us beyond war zones catch all of this, if at all, indirectly, through media.  We do not hear the sirens and we do not have to go underground.  We do not have to check social media to see if friends and family are alive. The word “launch” retains a kind of innocence.

This is not about countries being different, but about situations being difference.  Kharkiv in normal times is a major literary city. In the 2020s, before the Russian full-scale invasion, Kharkiv was a center of Ukrainian book production.  Before February 2022 there were plenty of launches, in the literary sense, in Kharkiv. And there are still some now!

Genocide is not only about killing people, but about eliminating a culture, making it untenable by destroying the institutions that transmit it.  Thus Russia burns books, steals museum artifacts, and bombs archives, libraries, and publishing houses.  Russia deliberately destroyed the publishing houses in Kharkiv, including where one of my own books was being printed.  One sort of launch would seem to obliterate the other.  But, to the Ukrainians’ credit, only for a time.  The book publishing industry, like a number of others, picked up in other places. The public book culture in Ukraine, expressed in new stores and cafes, is defiant.

I was thinking of “launches” in Kyiv, a couple of days after the Kharkiv visit, as I pretaped an interview about the book.  For me it was the end of a long day, spent beginning (“launching”) a big history project.  The first conference had gone well, and we had a press conference complete with a Viking sword, a Byzantine cross, and Scythian and Trypillian vessels kindly loaned by the national museum.  Ukrainian colleagues on the stage had spoken of the importance of cooperation and listening in our grand cooperative project.  I was in a good mood when I went to a side room to tape the interview.

At around the time the interview began, a missile was launched from Russia, aimed at Kyiv.   The air raid sirens began outside the window.  An air raid siren can mean different forms of attack, some more rapid and some less so.  Drones can cause terrible damage and kill large numbers of people, but they are not very fast.  If a missile is in the air, on the other hand, you have to move right away.  Since there was in fact a missile bearing down on Kyiv, I explained this to the interviewer and hastened to the stairs.  I learned that Ukrainian air defense had destroyed the missile as I reached the staircase.

This was all completely normal.  The Russians launched a number of very large strikes last week with missiles and drones.  Ukrainian air defense is excellent — when the Ukrainians are given the tools, they protect their people extremely well, and Kyiv is where their limited equipment is concentrated.  We picked up the interview as soon as I could re-establish the connection.

One sort of “launch” had been briefly interrupted by another, my literary book launch by a literal missile launch.  This was an infinitesimally tiny taste of the interruption tens of millions of Ukrainians face all the time from Russia’s senseless war, which changes the shapes of lives even when it does not end them.  Russia launches these attacks on civilians all the time, almost every day.  The point is not only to kill people and destroy civilian architecture but to instill a certain view of life.  Nothing good ever happens. Be afraid at all times.  Undertake nothing new yourselves.  Give up.

But people do start new projects in Ukraine.  Ukrainian writers have been productive during this war, including writers serving in the armed forces. Serhiy Zhadan, an extraordinary Kharkiv poet and novelist, has just published a book. I was able to have three discussions with him in two cities. One day there will be a collection of Ukrainian war poetry in translation, and it will be astounding. Ukrainians launch cultural projects one after the other, even if the word seems odd just now.  I took part in two such launches in just one week: the big history project in Kyiv, called Ukrainian History Global Initiative; and a new cultural institution in Lviv, INDEX, which is based around recording war experience from multiple methods and multiple perspectives.  The Literary Museum in Kharkiv has an interesting new (partly interactive) exhibition by K. Zorkin.

When we can meet, we can gather the senses of words from the settings.  I am grateful to all my friends and colleagues and hosts in Ukraine.  Without the time in Ukraine On Freedom would be a different and poorer book. And so, much as I am happy to be speaking about the book today in the UK and the US, it seems right that there was something like a launch in Kharkiv first. 

When we cannot meet, we still have the words.  We can follow the senses of the word “launch,” from the rougher to the gentler and back, along an arc that perhaps leads to some understanding.

TS, 16 September 2024

In Kharkiv, September 2024, in conversation with Volodymyr Yermolenko

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International

Johaan Neem: How to Respond to a Candidate Who Threatens Political Violence and Our Constitution?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2024 //
20

Johaan Neem is a historian at Western Washington University. He recently published a thoughtful essay about the crisis of our time, the fateful election before us. Will voters return to power a man who has made known his contempt for our Constitution and for the norms of democracy? Neem likens our present dilemma to the “exclusion crisis” in England in the late 1670s and early 1680s. King Charles II sought to turn England into an absolutist state; he canceled laws passed by Parliament and oust local officials who displeased him. Neem suggests that that the U.S. is experiencing a comparable crisis when the question before us is how to resist a tyrannical government that came to power legitimately.

Neem writes:

Today, America is roiled with its own Exclusion Crisis. We too face the very real possibility that in this fall’s election a legal succession could bring to power an executive who has demonstrated his willingness to undermine our Constitution. To draw the parallel is not to propose armed resistance but to force us to reckon with the dreadful gravity of this moment: We may be about to hold an election which will render our Constitution invalid. 

We should not confuse reasonable differences between the two parties and their policies with threats to the Constitution itself. In a democratic republic, open disagreement is a sign of civic health. Regardless of one’s partisan loyalties and policy preferences, however, the evidence is clear that Donald Trump poses a threat to the republic. Like Locke before us, we must consider how to respond should an empowered political leader unknit our order.

There have been many articles and books examining Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his admiration for authoritarian leaders around the world. The largest threats he poses to the Constitution are not his policies but his efforts to undermine the rule of law by embracing violence as a political tool. Numerous high-ranking officials from the Trump Administration have made clear that, but for their resistance, as president, Trump would have undermined the Constitution during his first term. He has joked that he’ll be a dictator on the first day of his second term, but there’s nothing funny about it. If re-elected, he has promised to unleash all the force of the United States Justice Department against his political opponents, from Gen. Mark A. Milley to President Biden and Vice President Harris, and to bypass the judicial system by using military tribunals. We should take his word for it. 

Trump’s violence — his penchant for it, for inciting it, and valorizing it — should terrify us most of all. He encouraged and then celebrated the efforts of his supporters on January 6 to undermine an election and threaten the safety of America’s elected officials. At the heart of the American system is the freedom of elected legislatures. That freedom itself emerged out of conflicts between Parliament and King — and between colonial assemblies and royal governors — during the 17th and 18th centuries. The consent of the governed depends ultimately on free elections and the capability of the people’s elected representatives to deliberate the public good. Trump is committed to undermining legislative freedom. Both Republican Senator Mitt Romney and former Representative Liz Cheney have revealed that members of Congress were afraid to vote to impeach President Trump — even when they believed that he had committed impeachable offenses — because they worried that his supporters would threaten their families’ safety. When legislators are not free to deliberate and vote, the Constitution is already dead. 

Fear kills freedom. Fear is the point. 

This is an excerpt. Please open the link to finish reading the essay.

It’s strange indeed that a lifelong playboy who spent his time developing fast-buck schemes, operating casinos, and attending professional wrestling matches has the ability to intimidate and control an entire political party with threats of violence.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, History, Trump

Florida: University President Sasse Spent Lavishly on Parties

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2024 //
25

Former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse served briefly as president of the University of Florida–17 months. During that time, he spent lavishly on staff and entertaining. He hired members of his former DC staff at six-figure salaries and allowed them to work remotely. He resigned in July to “spend more time with his family,” but will be paid his salary of $1 million a year until February 2028.

The student newspaper reported another instance of Sasse’s extravagant spending; the story was republished in the Orlando Sentinel. It was written by Garrett Shanley and appeared in Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.

GAINESVILLE — The University of Florida’s then-president, Ben Sasse, dished out over $1.3 million on private catering for lavish dinners, football tailgates and extravagant social functions — a figure roughly double the amount spent by his predecessor and one that included a holiday party featuring a $38,610 sushi bar.

At the Dec. 7 holiday party, Sasse hosted about 200 guests who dined on fresh sushi hand-rolled by two dedicated chefs alongside traditional dishes of beef, chicken and sweet desserts. The event, detailed in a newly released list of more than 500 itemized catering expenses obtained under Florida’s public records law, cost $176,816, or roughly $900 per person.

The guest list that night included UF’s top brass and officials with the university’s fundraising foundation, who solicit big checks for education programs from wealthy donors. With a student choir caroling in the background, Sasse personally welcomed guests as they arrived at the old president’s mansion on campus, and later toasted them from two open bars serving unlimited alcohol. The bill for the liquor alone was listed as $7,061.

Sasse’s yuletide soirée was the largest single expenditure — nearly 15% of his total catering spending — until he abruptly resigned in July after 17 months in office. The new details about his outsized catering costs add to disclosures about his office’s multi-million dollar spending on lucrative consulting contracts and high-paid, remote jobs he awarded to Republican former staffers and allies that have generated bipartisan scrutiny and promises of government audits.

Open the link to finish reading.

This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at garrettshanley@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.

Categories Florida, Higher Education

Florida: Who Is the Worst College President in the State? Sasse or Corcoran?

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2024 //
3

Nate Monroe of the Jacksonville, Florida, Times Union poses a challenging question: who is the worst college president in the state? Ben Sasse or Richard Corcoran? Sasse, the former Senator from Nebraska, was hand-picked by Governor DeSantis to be President of the state university system, the University of Florida. He hired several of his former staff in D.C. and paid them lavish salaries to stay in D.C. and work remotely. He retired after one year, with a $1 million annual salary until 2028. Corcoran, former Speaker of the House in Florida, former state education commissioner, rightwing ideologue, was selected by DeSantis to lead the conversion of tiny (700 students) New College from a bastion of progressivism to become a libertarian/Christian Hillsdale of the South.

He writes:

Richard Corcoran wasn’t about to let that runza monger hog the spotlight. No sir, if there’s going to be a disgraced university president in the news, by god it’s going to be Richard Michael Corcoran of New College of Florida, the once-respected liberal arts school turned raggedy right-wing academy for Clarence Thomas scholars.

Ben Sasse, the University of Florida’s former president, was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, making him Florida’s main character for the first half of the week. Not to be outdone, Corcoran’s latest sin is having his underlings toss a truckload of books into the garbage, according to a report Thursday from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Steven Walker, combining the oafish meanness of Matilda’s parents with the imagery of dystopian fiction. In a response befitting this disinformation age, Corcoran’s flaks called the account “false” — a bold statement in light of the video and photo evidence available — before then, with no hint of irony, confirming the account: “The images seen online of a dumpster of library materials is related to the standard weeding process.”

Some hapless Corcoran toady pointed to a state law to explain why the books couldn’t be donated or made available to students, as they had in the past, but that law merely confirms the clear fact that New College could have done exactly that. This was no accident: The books bound for the landfill included titles from the college’s former Gender and Diversity Center — a collection of words that, in the Free State of Florida, generally invite state censorship. Heaven forbid college kids read “Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate,” a book a curious New College student would have to dumpster dive to find now.

Corcoran is that most fitting a Floridian for the DeSantis era: a committed, strident ideologue, except in his own affairs. During his tenure in the state House, for example, he was known as a rude and miserly fiscal hawk, possessed with the belief college administrators were overpaid and spending lavishly. He seemed to believe that until he began trawling for a sinecure from his political superior, Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the world of public education. That first took the form of an appointment as Florida’s Education Commissioner, a mostly undistinguished term save for a bid-rigging scandal centered on the management of a small Florida school district.

As commissioner, he got the public attention he so often seems to crave, but his true apparent goal was becoming one of those overpaid college administrators himself. He gunned for a chance to run Florida State University — a crusade during which he flew a bit close to the sun — but ultimately landed a job running New College of Florida. He was installed by a remade board of trustees, a group of fanatics selected by DeSantis with the intention of making an example out of the small liberal-arts school.

Corcoran, an opponent of public education (save for his ability to make a buck off it), quickly set about turning New College into the Hillsdale of the South, a conservative higher-education bulwark. Vital to this work was securing for himself a plum compensation package worth about $1.1 million, a staggering sum that is among the highest in Florida despite New College being the state’s smallest public college.

It’s been one controversy after the next with Corcoran, but that so often seems to be the point.

Corcoran and Sasse’s hirings at their respective schools seemed to usher in a sea change in how higher education is run in Florida: experienced administrators were out, politicians were in. DeSantis carefully chose the appointees who run Florida’s college system, centralizing power over this diversified set of schools and allowing him to exert his will on issues like tenure and diversity programs. Every high-level vacancy in a Florida college prompts a fevered and terrified concern: which low-life politician is DeSantis going to stick them with next?

But Sasse and Corcoran have generated so much heat — Sasse in particular has come under criticism this week from no less than U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz and Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis — it’s tempting to hope this experience has even soured DeSantis on this particular project. The problem with useful idiots is that they happen to be … well, you know.

Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.

Categories DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Florida, Higher Education

Carl A. Cohn: How to End the Culture Wars in Our Schools

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2024 //
14

Carl Cohn is one of my personal heroes of American education. He served as superintendent in Long Beach and in San Diego, also as a member of the state board of education. Currently he is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. I first met him when I was researching my book The Death and life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. At the time, I was studying the San Diego schools as the site where corporate reform had its first try-out. Carl was brought in by the school board to put the district back together after nearly a decade of disruptive and punitive reforms. What I remember most from our candid, off-the-record conversation was his advice: the most important connection between the superintendent and teachers is trust. He subsequently published an essay about trust for “Education Week,” and I quoted him in my book.

Carl Cohn wrote this essay for School Administrator magazine.

Last summer, I attended a raucous school board meeting in Orange County, Calif., where a conservative school board majority had fired a popular superintendent, started remov-
ing books from libraries, banning
LGBTQ+ symbols and considering a new parental notification policy that would, in effect, restrict the protected rights of certain students under both state and federal law.

After sitting in a crowded room with adult culture warriors going back and forth for several hours with heated exchanges, I was struck by the bravery of a young transgender high school student who had the courage to go to the podium to address her elected school board with the following request: “I just want to feel safe at school. Please make that happen!”

Fast forward to the March 5 Super Tuesday primary elections here in California, one that was characterized by historically low turnout, which usually gives prominence to the voting habits of older, whiter and more conservative voters.

A new progressive coalition of parents, teachers, organized labor and community members successfully recalled two of the conservative members of the school board majority there and recently appointed progressive replacements for them. The other two members of the previous conservative majority are up for re-election on the November ballot.


A Hopeful trend


This outcome caught the political pundits and experts by surprise. The 25,000-student Orange Unified School District in Orange, Calif., sits in the heart of historic Ronald Reagan country, which is trending purple rather than solidly red in high-turnout elections. It was not seen as a likely place to launch the progressive pushback against the culture wars that have dominated public school debates at the local level, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.


Evidence of this hopeful new trend is emerg- ing in school district elections around the country, including the critical battleground states that are the key to the upcoming November presidential election outcome.


The emerging evidence from Bucks County and Reading in Pennsylvania, Clarksville in Ten- nessee, Lexington in Kentucky, Middletown in Ohio, Plattsmouth in Nebraska, suburban New Jersey and other parts of the country suggests that new coalitions of parents and allies are say- ing emphatically that the interests of all K-12 school children should be the main agenda rather than this recent proxy for the adult culture wars. The latter often creates real-time chaos and dis- ruption in public school districts.

Most of these conservative school board agen- das in the past four years generally have flown under the seemingly common-sense banner of something called “parental rights,” which suggests that a majority of parents absolutely know what is best when it comes to policymaking at their local public schools. Who could possibly disagree with such a valid notion?


I would argue that anyone who has studied the legitimate history of the United States would disagree vehemently because the sad truth is that parental rights often have been used in America to take away the rights of certain children under the guise that parents know best under all circumstances.


Did those Louisiana parents know best when they tried to deny an education to six-year-old Ruby Bridges back in 1960? The mob that yelled at that innocent young black girl was argu-
ing absurdly that parents know best under all circumstances.


Or in liberal-learning California and Mas- sachusetts in the late 1970s when school board members declared that parents in Boston and Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley should control who attends the public schools there?
Consider the fact the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education has logged a record number of complaints this past year, con- firming that the rights of vulnerable students are under systematic assault throughout our nation.

Communities push back


Writing for The Christian Science Monitor, reporter Courtney Martin describes the rust-belt community of Middletown, Ohio, made famous by Senator J.D. Vance’s 2016 best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” as an emerging success story in fighting back against the school culture wars that dominate so many communities in America.

The school district’s first Black superintendent, Marlon Styles, rather than getting defensive, decided to engage with the parents and commu- nity members who criticized his emphasis on cul- turally responsive approaches to school discipline, reducing inequality and full-on embrace of equity.


Styles sat down with the Middletown Area Ministerial Alliance and began a dialogue, listen- ing and learning tour that was critical to reas- suring the respected faith leaders that the school district he headed had not adopted policies inconsistent with the family values they all shared and supported.


Unlike Middletown’s rust-belt status, the Pennridge School District of Bucks County, Pa.,
is a suburban middle-class community just north of Philadelphia, where a progressive alliance suc- cessfully ousted a 5-4 Moms for Liberty school board majority last November 2023 that was determined to adopt a curriculum from conservative Hillsdale College along with banning policies on diversity, equity and inclusion, Pride flags and books with questionable content.


This is yet another example of a community of voters putting the brakes on efforts to adopt extremist policies at the local school board level. As in other communities, these progressive forces do not have the monetary resources that often give a huge advantage to their better-funded conservative opponents.


One of the more interesting progressive groups fighting back against the conservative parental rights groups has emerged in suburban New Jer- sey. It calls itself SWEEP, or Suburban Women Engaged, Empowered and Pissed. Its members often work with Districts for Democracy, the New Jersey Public Education Coalition and Action Together New Jersey to push back against well- funded conservative alliances.


While open discrimination against LBGTQ+ students through forced outing policies is often the galvanizing force in many of the emerging
progressive pushback efforts, book banning is another significant issue drawing the ire of voters in some communities.


The Omaha World-Herald reported on the suc- cessful recall earlier this year of a newly elected school board member in the small community
of Plattsmouth, Neb., about 20 miles south of Omaha, who argued that about 50 books needed
to be immediately removed from school libraries based on her objections to their adult content.
In addition, the board member argued, “People that voted for me should have been very well
informed on who I was and what I was going to do.” Her book removal campaign led to a grass- roots coalition of parents, students and commu- nity members who came together to recall her from the school board after she served on the board for only a single year.


PEN America, a free speech organization, is tracking a record number of book bans in U.S. school districts, encompassing 23 states and more than 4,000 books removed in the first five months of 2024. It’s no surprise Florida leads the nation in book bans with 3,135 removed in 11 school districts during the fall 2023 semester.


On a personal note, I volunteered in the same 1st-grade classroom for 20-plus years at Colin Powell School in the Long Beach Unified School District, which I headed for 10 years as super- intendent. In spring 2023, at the start of the baseball season, I read my 1st graders a book that is banned in Duval County, Florida’s fourth largest school system. It’s a delightful children’s book by author Jonah Winter titled Roberto Clemente, Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates. It captures the iconic story of the great Puerto Rican baseball player and humanitarian who died when his plane crashed while transporting relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua on New Year’s Eve in 1972. My 1st graders loved the story of this Caribbean island hero.


Before reading it to my students, I searched for what the objectionable content might be. The only thing I could find was a single sentence that referenced the fact “White sports writers called him lazy when he first came up to the Pirates from the minor leagues.” As most sports fans know, sports writers of all colors are sometimes wrong about future Hall of Famers.


Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, with 19,000 students about 40 miles north of Anchorage, is the center of the most recent book banning controversy to come under federal court scrutiny with a lawsuit brought by
the ACLU and the Northern Justice Project last
fall, according to Alaska Public Media.

The plaintiffs, representing students and par-
ents, are arguing that the school district’s removal of 50-plus books that citizens had complained about is unconstitutional and violates the free speech rights of students. A ruling from a U.S. District Court judge is expected later this year on the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction halting the school district’s removal of the books in question.


A policy under consideration in Wyoming’s largest school district, Laramie County School District 1, would ban any book containing “sexu- ally explicit content” in elementary schools and discourage their use in junior high and high schools, according to news coverage in the Cow- boy State Daily.


The battle there is joined by the Cheyenne chapter of Moms for Liberty on one side and the Wyoming Family Alliance for Freedom on the other. Both sides are gearing up for battle as the school board considers final adoption of this strict policy.


Students First


This past spring, I moderated a panel discussion in Sacramento, Calif., on the embattled political landscape of public schools in California. The
speakers included the dynamic executive direc- tor of our statewide administrators association, a heroic new member of our state legislature and a 17-year-old high school senior who was about to graduate from Chaparral High School in the Temecula Valley Unified School District. The latter is a district whose board, endorsed by an evangelical church, has embraced the notion that the public schools are “the devil’s playground.”

The brilliance of the public school student leader, about to go off to college, stole the show as she confidently articulated what she had learned from outstanding teachers who had exposed her to an honest history of our country and diverse literature that inspires. Proudly sitting in the front row of this large hotel ballroom and cheering her on was her mother, who pointed out that caring and dedicated teachers presenting the truth was what she wanted and demanded from her local public school district. This student and her parent are part of the progressive One Temecula Valley PAC that recently recalled the church-sponsored school board president there.

As we examine the extraordinary stakes in
this fall’s election, school leaders would do well to remember that satisfied students and parents are the best allies and advocates that we could possibly have in the fight to defeat extremists and their blatantly false narratives about America’s public schools.


CARL COHN, a retired superintendent, is professor emeritus and senior research fellow at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif.


Marlon Styles, former superintendent in Middletown, Ohio, convened members of the faith community to recon- cile differing points of view.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read

Thoughts and Prayers for Former President Trump

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2024 //
14

It’s a sad day in America indeed. Trump’s Secret Service agents thwarted an apparent effort to assassinate him. An agent saw a man with a long gun protruding into the golf course where the former president was playing. The agent fired at the man, who dropped his weapon and fled. A witness saw the suspect fleeing, took a picture of his car and license plate, and he was captured on the highway less than an hour later.

I send my thoughts and prayers to the former President.

I also note that he has stood solidly with the National Rifle Association in opposing all forms of gun control. One wishes that he might change his mind about gun control as a result of his fortunate escape from mortal peril. And one concludes that nothing will change.

The guy who was arrested, a former roofing contractor in North Carolina, has previously been arrested for weapons violations. From what I’ve read, he appears to be erratic, disturbed, and delusional. A crackpot.

The suspect apparently never fired a shot. Luckily, he was spotted and fled before he had the chance to fire his weapon.

Something must be said about Trump’s frequent encouragement of violence by his supporters. He likes violent imagery, he talks in apocalyptic tones about what will happen to the country if he is not re-elected. He has celebrated the J6 insurrectionists as “patriots.” He has downplayed the consequences of their violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. He told them on that fateful day, “You must fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore.”

Neither Trump nor JD Vance have expressed outrage when it happens to others. After the school shooting in Georgia, Vance said that school shootings are “a fact of life,” which implies that we should learn to accept them, not take meaningful steps to limit access to guns. Trump said after a school shooting in Iowa that people must “get over it” and move on.

There should be no tolerance for political violence in this country. I’d like to say “That’s not who we are,” but I can’t. It’s in the interest of every elected official to encourage unity, peace, and calm resolution of differences. It’s in the interest of every elected official to demand gun control.

The ballot, not the bullet.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Guns, Trump

Do Parents Always Know What’s Best for Their Children? NO.

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2024 //
24

Over recent years, we have heard again and again that parents always know what’s best for their child. And so we have vouchers and home-schooling because “parents always know what’s best for their child.”

No, they don’t.

Read this story and ask yourself whether this parent knew what was best for her child.

I wish I had saved the many stories of this kind that I have read over the past decade. Thank God, they don’t happen every day but they do happen.

Whenever I write about abusive parents like the one in this horrific story, I get inundated by angry letters from advocates for parents’ rights, especially homeschoolers. Let ’em write.

The state should have had someone to look after this boy. They should have had the authority to take the child away from his mother, who hated him, to save his life.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, New Hampshire, Parents

No Sanewashing of Trump at The Washington Post!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2024 //
37

The mainstream media has grappled with the dilemma of how to write about Trump ever since he became a candidate for the Presidency in 2015. He lies nonstop; he never admits his errors. He boasts nonstop; he insults his political adversaries. His vulgarities and crudeness are openly displayed at his rallies.

Most reporting about him simply ignores his lies, especially his insistence that he won the election in 2020, despite losing some 60 court cases in which his lawyers presented no credible evidence of voter fraud.

His lies have undermined public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system, which is the central mechanism of democracy. Demonizing a small and powerless group encourages hatred and even vigilantism.

Ignoring his lies is called “sanewashing.”

Dan Balz, the chief correspondent for The Washington Post, wrote the following article today, in which he truthfully describes Trump’s nonstop lying.

Former president Donald Trump has long inhabited a bizarre world of his own creation. He rewrites history — or makes it up entirely — to aggrandize himself, denigrate others and spread the basest of lies.

It keeps getting worse.

Since Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he’s spiraled ever deeper into conspiracy theories, falsehoods and grievances. He insists he is not a loser. He never lost the 2020 election, he says falsely, and he certainly didn’t lose that debate in Philadelphia. He claims victory in an event in which he spent 90 minutes chasing Harris’s barbs down every possible rabbit hole. He rarely managed to get off the defensive long enough to make a case against her — and when he did, he was barely coherent.

Trump can’t accept the widely held verdict that Harris outdid him, just like he couldn’t accept that President Joe Biden defeated him four years ago. On Friday night, during a rally in Las Vegas that was replete with baseless claims about a variety of topics, he spun up the tale that Harris was receiving the questions during the debate.

Elevating a conspiracy theory that popped up on social media, he falsely claimed she had hearing devices in her earrings, that she was being coached on what to say in real time. He did it in classic Trump style, citing unspecified hearsay as proof.

“I hear she got the questions, and I also heard she had something in her ear,” he said. ABC News, which hosted the debate, denied these false claims, but Trump cares little for the truth. He prefers to spread lies to excuse his own poor performance and to stir up his supporters to think the game was somehow rigged. All that does is further divide the country.

He used a similar technique during the debate, notably about immigration. That night he repeated a claim that had spread on social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of local residents. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” he said.

When David Muir, one of the two ABC moderators, pointed out that the city manager in Springfield had told the network there were “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” Trump replied, “Well, I’ve seen people on television.”

As Muir tried to interject, Trump continued. “The people on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” he said. Muir responded, “I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.”

Trump tried again, saying, “But, the people on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there.” Muir countered once more. “Again, the Springfield city manager says there is no evidence of that,” he said. “We’ll find out,” an unrepentant Trump said.

In the past few years, Springfield has experienced a large influx of Haitian immigrants, who are in the United States legally. They have filled jobs in local businesses but they also have put a strain on the city’s services and caused an uproar among some local citizens. Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), seeking to highlight the issue of immigration in the campaign, helped put the town in the spotlight after an 11-year-old boy was killed in a traffic accident caused by a Haitian migrant.

Nathan Clark, the boy’s father recently denounced those who have invoked the death of his son to score political points, calling it “reprehensible.” “To clear the air,” he said last week, “my son Aiden Clark was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti.” He criticized Trump, Vance and other politicians for using the tragedy to advance their own interests. “They have spoken my son’s name and use his death for political gain,” he said. “This needs to stop now.”

The repeated false claims about the Haitian community have brought threats to the city. On Friday, two elementary schools in Springfield were evacuated because of bomb threats and a middle school closed. It was the second day in a row that schools were closed due to such threats. The Columbus Dispatch reported that one of the threats included the same debunked claims about the migrant community that have circulated on social media.

Trump continues to fuel anti-immigrant outrage. He has previously said that if elected he would order the deportation of all undocumented immigrants living in the United States, a proposal judged by experts as both impractical and legally questionable. During a Friday news conference with reporters in California, Trump said, “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora, [Colorado].”

Aurora is another city Trump cites as being destroyed by illegal migration, saying that it has been overrun by Venezuelan gangs. Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a former Republican U.S. House member, said last week that such claims are “grossly exaggerated,” that the problem is limited to specific housing properties and is being dealt with by law enforcement.

That Trump has lost focus on the messages his campaign wants to highlight has been evident for weeks. There are issues that could put Harris on the defensive, if he were capable of a sustained and effective message based on facts and not falsehoods. He’s proving that he isn’t able to do that.

Most polls show that voters believe he is better able to handle the economy and inflation, issues at the top of voters’ lists of concerns. He has an advantage on immigration. Beyond that, Harris is still trying to fill out her profile for voters. In a Friday interview with Brian Taff of WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, she offered mostly general answers to some specific questions about how she would lower prices and where she differs with Biden.

In the debate, Trump tried repeatedly to put immigration front and center, but he was ineffective, in large part because of exaggerations or, as with the Springfield example, outright lies. Many Republicans who support Trump for president fear he is neither talking about what matters most to voters nor heeding the counsel of his campaign’s senior advisers.

Meanwhile, the question of who has his ear has come to the fore. Laura Loomer is an attention-seeking purveyor of racist and homophobic comments and a spreader of conspiracy theories. Recently she posted on X that if Harris, who is Black and Indian American, is elected, the White House will “smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

Last week, Loomer accompanied Trump to the debate in Philadelphia and joined him the next day at ceremonies commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A year ago, she had posted on X that those attacks were “an inside job,” a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence.

Her presence at Trump’s side has alarmed many Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) recently posted on X: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning reelection. Enough.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told a reporter for HuffPost that her history “is just really toxic.” Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a committed acolyte of Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and herself a purveyor of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, called Loomer’s comment about Harris “appalling and extremely racist,” adding, “This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.”

Trump, who has praised Loomer over the years, on Friday tried to duck from the criticism about her. He first claimed that he didn’t really know what she has said. Later he posted on Truth Social that he disagrees with the statements she’s made, a classic dodge on his part.

He went on to suggest that she is justified because she is “tired of watching the Radical Left Marxists and Fascists violently attack and smear me.” Apparently, no one can be too extreme if they support him — or at least they can be forgiven.

This has been Trump’s pattern from the time he first became a candidate nine years ago. If anything, he has become even less disciplined and more conspiratorial than he was back then. Few people likely to vote this fall do not already have an opinion about him, pro or con. Because the country is so closely divided and questions about Harris exist, he remains in a position to possibly win the election.

******************************************

Our nation needs a sane and reasonable immigration policy. No one favors open borders. Trump’s brand of divisiveness makes it hard to envision that he will be able to achieve bipartisan consensus on any legislation. Meanwhile Trump unleashes and politicizes racism and hatred. What grows in such a climate is violence against the targets, either by lone wolves or by mobs.

A question for political scientists and historians: how did this race-baiting, misogynist con man manage to take control of a once-great political party? Mitch McConnell could have impeached Trump after the attack on the U.S., but he assumed that Trump had disgraced himself. The U.S. Supreme Court had the opportunity to remove him from the ballot for having incited an insurrection, but dodged the decision, betraying their alleged commitment to textualism and originalism. In an article in the Atlantic, Mark Leibovich attributes the subjugation of the GOP to the spinelessness of its leaders.

What Dan Balz demonstrates is that journalists have a moral obligation to their readers to tell the truth. That’s a good start.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: JD Vance Should Resign in Shame!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2024 //
9

Despite the debunking of the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, despite the story becoming a national joke, JD Vance continues to peddle it. Vance is a senator from Ohio, meaning that he is hurling insults at people he supposedly represents.

Jamelle Bouie is a regular columnist for the New York Times.

If Senator JD Vance of Ohio had a moral compass, a shred of decency or a belief in anything other than his own ambition and will-to-power, he would resign his Senate seat effective immediately, leave the presidential race and retire from public life, following a mournful apology for his ethical transgressions.

As it stands, Vance has done none of the above, which is why he is still, as of today, using his position in the United States Senate and on the Republican Party presidential ticket to spread lies and smears against his own constituents in Springfield — Haitian immigrants who have settled there to make a new life for themselves.

The main impact of those lies and smears — which began Monday when Vance told his followers on X that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and continued Tuesday when Donald Trump told an audience of 67 million people that “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats” — has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.

On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of two elementary schools, city hall and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. The mayor has received threats to his office, and local families fear for the safety of their children. Several Springfield residents, including Nathan Clark — father of Aiden Clark, the 11-year-old killed when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — have pleaded with Trump and Vance to end their attacks and leave the community in peace.

“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” said Clark, rebutting a claim made by Vance. “This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued. “Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose.”

This direct rebuke from a grieving father has stopped neither Vance nor Trump from spreading anti-immigrant — and specifically anti-Haitian — lies and fanning the flames of hatred. “Don’t let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town,” Vance said on Friday. “We should talk about it every day.”

The “humanitarian crisis,” it should be said, is the revitalization of Springfield after years of decline. Haitian immigrants have filled jobs, bought homes and filled city coffers with property and sales taxes. And while there are growing pains from the sudden influx of new residents, the charge that Haitian immigrants have, in Vance’s words, brought a “massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates and crime” is false. He is lying about people, the very people he swore an oath to represent, in ways that will inspire additional threats of violence and may well bring physical harm to the community.

Categories Elections, Fake, Hoax, Immigration, Lies, Ohio, Vance, J.D.
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