Mercedes Schneider: The Great Arizona Dune Buggy Fiasco

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2024 //
6

Readers know that the State Board of education in Arizona actually turned down a parent’s request to use voucher money to buy three dune buggies. Amazing!

Mercedes Schneider digs deeper. In this post, she transcribes the discussion about the vote at the State Board meeting. She includes a list of eight dune buggies at different price points, from about $600 to $$18,000 each. Which did the parent choose?

And she closes with this pertinent question:

If the state of Arizona approves an educational program that involves riding a dune buggy purchased with state money, does the state then open itself up to liability if something happens to the child while operating that state-purchased dune buggy?

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Vouchers

Arizona: Should Taxpayers Pay for Trampolines, LEGO Sets, and Dune Buggies?

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2024 //
0

Laurie Roberts, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, asks a sensible question that has probably occurred to most voters in Arizona, but not to Republican legislators. What expenditures should be disallowed with state voucher money? Until recently, the sky was the limit. But then the state board turned down a parent who paid for three dune buggies (each of which costs thousands of dollars).

Under former Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, the legislature kept expanding the state’s voucher program. Parents and educators organized a state referendum on voucher expansion in 2018, and the voters overwhelmingly opposed it. But the Republicans pushed forward and made vouchers universal, available to every student in the state. And of course, the state board was extremely lax in allowing dubious expenditures.

Roberts wrote:

Good news for taxpayers, especially the ones who think public money ought to go to public schools.

The state is drawing the line at paying for dune buggies.

Kayaks, apparently, still are allowed as an acceptable educational expense under the state’s universal school voucher program, as are $900 Lego sets, trampoline sessions, Broadway tickets and espresso machines.

But isn’t it nice to know we absolutely are digging in our heels at the ridiculous notion of taxpayers shelling out for dune buggies?

So far, anyway.

Dune buggies fail the ‘reasonableness’ test

The Arizona State Board of Education on Monday rejected a parent’s appeal to use her kids’ state school Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to buy three dune buggies.

“At some point, I think the question of reasonableness comes to mind,” Board President Daniel Corr said, in voting to order the woman to pay for her own darn dune buggies.

If you’re inclined to reply, “duh,” know that Monday’s vote overturns the ruling of an appeal hearing officer who recommended that we foot the bill for the buggies.

And the Department of Education, which at first denied the expense then approved it — “mistakenly,” it claims.

DOE in March suspended the family’s school voucher accounts and requested reimbursement for the dune buggies, prompting the mother to appeal and decry “crass incompetence.”

“Telling us months later that we have to pay back something that was approved by the department has to be illegal in 50 states and a few territories,” she wrote in the appeal.

Yeah, and trying to sucker the state into paying for dune buggies ought to be galling in 50 states and more than a few territories.

In this case, the system worked … so far. Though I’ve got to wonder how a dune buggy ever got approved in the first place.

And how the state plans to recover our money.

According to The Arizona Republic’s Nick Sullivan, the parent got an occupational therapist to testify that her kids learn better after a trek through the desert, allowing them “to engage in movement before returning to more traditional learning environments.”

So, buy kids some bikes. With your own funds, not ours.

Or take them to the park.

Save Our Schools Arizona has been sounding the alarm about the state’s runaway ESA program all year, pointing to more than $100 million in non-educational spending approved without any academic justification.

Curiously, those fiscal hawks over at the Legislature had no concerns.

Vouchers shouldn’t leave taxpayers high and dry

Fortunately, Attorney General Kris Mayes does.

In July, she opened an investigation into the ESA program. Specifically, into Superintendent Tom Horne’s well-used rubber stamp — the one his department employs to approve “supplemental” educational expenses like $900 Lego sets and ninja training and ski passes.

Jenny Clark, an ESA parent who runs an organization to help parents get vouchers and was appointed by then-Gov. Doug Ducey to the state Board of Education, cast the only vote Monday to approve the dune buggy boondoggle. She noted that it’s the first time since she joined the board in 2022 that it has rejected a hearing officer’s recommendation in a voucher appeal.

Corr, meanwhile, indicated the parent could appeal the board’s decision.

If ever there was a case that illustrates the need for better oversight of ESAs — something the Republican-run Legislature refuses to consider — surely, this is it.

It shouldn’t have taken a trip all the way to the state Board of Education to declare that you don’t need a recreational vehicle to chase down a good education.

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Vouchers

Tucker Carlson Interviews Holocaust Denier

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2024 //
25

Tucker Carlson lost his popular show on FOX News, but he now has a podcast on Elon Musk’s Twitter platform (X). Recently he invited a Holocaust Denier to appear on his show.

This is personal to me because every member of my extended family in Europe was murdered. As a child in Houston, I remember meeting people who had a blue tattoo on their arm–a string of numbers. They were survivors, and they told stories and wrote books about the atrocities they saw and experienced. In fact, there are countless videos taken by the Nazis to document the atrocities that Holocaust Deniers now claim are fiction.

It’s one of the strange ironies of our time that right wingers like Tucker Carlson now look sympathetically on fascists like Viktor Orban of Hungary and dictators like Putin. Carlson scored an exclusive interview with Putin and visited a supermarket to showcase the quality of life in Moscow. Trump praises Putin and the dictators of China and North Korea.

Who is Darryl Cooper? I looked him up on Google. Checked Wikipedia. I could find no evidence that he had gone to college. He is no historian.

Then I found historian Niall Ferguson’s commentary, which he called “The Return of Anti-History.”

He wrote:

According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none. 

According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.” 

The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history. 

True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism. 

Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, was taken aback by Carlson’s latest foray into historical revisionism.

She wrote:

This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast (and newsletter) called “Martyr Made,” considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order. The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued Cooper, is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately.

This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various strands of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and savvy for imbibing absurdities. Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites. (The wildly antisemitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust named its journal An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality. They blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.

Long before 4Chan existed, the disgraced Holocaust-denying author David Irving urged his followers, in an early 1990s speech, to break through the “appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere” surrounding World War II by being aggressively tasteless. “You’ve got to say things like: ‘More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz,’” he said.

Until quite recently, American conservatives mostly maintained antibodies against Irving-style disinformation. Right-wing thought leaders generally shared the same broad historical understanding of World War II as the rest of society, felt patriotic pride at America’s role in it and viewed Hitler as metaphysically wicked. Rather than recognizing the way right-wing politics, taken to extremes, could shade into National Socialism, they would hurl Nazi comparisons at the left, as the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg did in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.”

[Jonah] Goldberg’s approach was dishonest, but it was representative of a broad antifascist consensus in American politics. Cooper is, in fact, correct that abhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Lies

New York Times Portrays Trump’s and Vance’s Incoherence re Child care Costs

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2024 //
17

The big story in the mass media and blogs over the past two days was the way Trump answered a question in an appearance in New York City about whether he would do anything to make child care affordable; he was asked to be specific. He gave a long (two minute) reply that was meandering and incoherent. He seemed to say that the money that the U.S. will collect from tariffs will be so huge that it will wipe out the national deficit and make everything possible, including the cost of child care, assuming that tariffs would produce revenue instead of raising consumer prices. He didn’t answer the question.

Meanwhile, in another setting, JD Vance was asked about child care. He responded that parents could ask grandparents or other relatives to help out; and he suggested lowering the certification requirements for child care providers.

The New York Times must have realized, based on the keen interest in this story, that its original reporting was inadequate. At 4:42 pm EST, the Times published a story by Michael C. Bender about what happened. With this article, The New York Times squelched persistent rumors that it was not reporting on Trump’s mental acuity.

This was the headline:

Trump and Vance Took Questions on Child Care. Their Non-Answers Said a Lot.

The former president and his running mate gave nearly equally confusing answers when asked separately this week how they would make child care more affordable.

But instead of a crisp, camera-ready reply from a seasoned three-time presidential candidate, Mr. Trump unspooled two of the most puzzling minutes of his campaign.

His answer was a jolting journey through disjointed logic about how the size of his tariffs would take care of all the nation’s children, which only raised a new, more complicated question about why he remains unable to provide straightforward answers about policies he would prioritize in a second term.

“Well, I would do that,” he said when asked if he would commit to supporting legislation to make child care more affordable, and how he would seek to do so.

“And we’re sitting down — you know, I was somebody — we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue,” Mr. Trump continued, referring to the pair’s previous push for paid family leave and expanding the child tax credit. “It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”

Mr. Trump has long portrayed himself as the nation’s economist-in-chief, a rich businessman-turned-politician now focused on increasing the wealth of everyday Americans.

He has spent two years campaigning against rising prices for Americans, from housing to food to, yes, child care. At times, he has spoken briefly about instituting “baby bonuses” for parents of newborns, and he has said that he would consider expanding the child tax credit but has not said by how much.

Mr. Trump’s rambling answer handed Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign an opportunity to press one of its central messages: that Mr. Trump is so out-of-touch with normal problems facing most Americans that he cannot be expected to find the solutions.

“He’s always been profoundly discursive, but this one is instructive,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “He immediately referenced the Rubio-Ivanka effort, which is actually the right answer. He just wasn’t involved or engaged in the details. So beyond that, he just pivots to a stream of consciousness about what he knows and cares about.”

Just a day earlier, on Wednesday, Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, responded to a similar question about child care with a nearly equally confusing answer at an event in Mesa, Ariz.

Mr. Vance, like Mr. Trump, acknowledged that the issue of affordable child care was “such an important question.” But his initial answer was that parents should get help from grandparents or aunts and uncles.

“Maybe Grandma and Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more,” Mr. Vance said.

But many parents cannot rely on help from relatives — and many relatives are not in a position to help with someone else’s children. Mr. Vance seemed to acknowledge that conundrum, and pivoted to calling for fewer regulations on child-care providers, falsely saying that child-care specialists were required to have “a six-year college degree.”

“Americans are much poorer because they’re paying out the wazoo for day care,” Mr. Vance said. “Empower working families. Empower people who want to do these things for a living, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”

Mr. Trump’s answer offered little additional clarity.

The former president seemed to outline a theory that his tariffs would result in such prosperity that the nation could wipe out its $6 trillion spending deficit and pay for additional benefits, like reducing child-care costs.

“As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday.

But Mr. Trump’s answer ignored that most economists say that the burden of tariffs are largely shouldered by middle-class consumers in the form of higher costs. Left unsaid was that he spent twice as much borrowed money during his term in the White House as President Biden has, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Ms. Harris has called for restoring and expanding a child tax credit and proposed a new $6,000 benefit for parents of newborns. Her child tax credit proposal would increase the maximum to $3,600 per child, up from $2,000 now.

Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesman, said in a statement that the tariffs Mr. Trump is proposing as part of his “‘plan’ for making child care more affordable” would raise costs on middle-class families. “The American people deserve a president who will actually cut costs for them, like Vice President Harris’s plan to bring back a $3,600 child tax credit for working families and an expanded $6,000 tax cut for families with newborn children.”

Thursday was not the first time that Mr. Trump has punted on the question of child-care costs.

In his debate with Mr. Biden this year, before the president dropped out of the race, the moderators asked Mr. Trump twice about what he would do to help with the affordability of child care.

In his first answer, Mr. Trump went off on a series of tangents related to earlier debate topics, defending his firing of retired Gen. John Kelly as his chief of staff, denying that he had called soldiers who had died in war “suckers” and “losers,” boasting about his firing “a lot of the top people at the F.B.I.,” accusing Mr. Biden of wanting “open borders” and denouncing him as “the worst president.”

Given an additional minute to address child-care costs, the topic of the question, Mr. Trump did not mention the word once.

“Just so you understand, we have polling,” Mr. Trump began. “We have other things that do — they rate him the worst because what he’s done is so bad. And they rate me, yes, I’ll show you. I will show you. And they rate me one of the best, OK?”

Categories Childhood, Elections, Funding, Parents, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Georgia: Father of Teenage Shooter Arrested and Charged

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2024 //
50

Parents have parental rights, and they also have parental responsibilities. One surely is to keep your guns, if you have them, locked up. Colin Gray didn’t do that. Instead, he gave his teenage son an AR-15 type weapon for Christmas in 2023. This was after the FBI had questioned father and son about online threats to shootup the boy’s school. The father insisted that he kept his hunting guns in a safe place, and the boy denied having any thought of harming anyone.

Georgia police arrested Colin Gray, the father of the 14-year-old boy who admitted bringing an assault weapon to school and murdering four people, including two students and two teachers. The father faces multiple charges that could land him in prison for life.

If police and courts make it customary and standard to hold parents accountable for their children, especially when they allow them to obtain deadly weapons, such expectations might have a deterrent effect.

The Washington Post reported:

Before Thursday’s announcement, the teen’s grandfather, Charles Polhamus, said he wanted Colin Gray charged along with his son.
“If he didn’t have a damn gun,” Polhamus said, “he wouldn’t have gone and killed anybody….”


The charges come just months after a mother and father in Michigan became the first parents of a school shooter ever convicted of involuntary manslaughter, a less severe crime than second-degree murder. Investigators found that, in November 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley had bought their 15-year-old son a gun, didn’t lock it up and ignored blatant warning signs before he opened fire at Oxford High in Michigan, killing four students. In separate trials, each was found guilty and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison, the maximum allowed.

Parental rights, parental responsibility.

Categories Accountability, Guns, Parents

NYC Schools Chancellor: Immigrants Are a “Godsend”

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2024 //
8

In an interview with the New York Times. NYC Schools Chancellor spoke up for immigrants and the public schools. It was refreshing to see his refusal to fall into the traps set by naysayers who badmouth the schools.

Troy Closson interviewed Mr. Banks:

As the school year opens for an American education system facing multiple crises, one education leader is staking out a curious stance. He is sublimely optimistic.

Public schools in the United States lost more than one million students between 2019 and 2022. The deluge of cash relief distributed during the coronavirus pandemic is drying up. And in a politically polarized era, fresh fights over what students learn in class are continuing to emerge.

But David C. Banks, the New York City schools chancellor, whose national profile rose this spring after his unyielding testimony at a House hearing on antisemitism in schools, argues in a recent interview that the state of urban education is not so bad.

All the woes of urban school districts can be found in New York, a diverse city that is contending with a major influx of homeless migrants. But in a departure from Mayor Eric Adams’s warnings that the migrant crisis is upending city life, Mr. Banks described the arrival of immigrant children as a boon.

As many states retreat from the teaching of race and identity in schools amid rising controversies, the chancellor doubled down on the value of those lessons in New York.

And he said that the rise of artificial intelligence did not represent an alarming threat of chatbot-enabled cheating, but a chance to transform education for the better.

As half of American adults say the education system is heading in the wrong direction, Mr. Banks argued that the “No. 1 thing” his administration had achieved was starting to rebuild faith in public schools.

The interviewer’s question are printed in bold.

New York City has enrolled nearly 40,000 new migrant children since July 2022. Are schools feeling the strain?

For some of the schools, the migrants coming here has been a godsend because we’ve lost so many other kids. Some schools were being threatened with whether we’re going to be able to keep the doors open. 

I push back on a lot of the kind of negative politics that people talk about with migrants. This is a city of immigrants. I mean, that’s the uniqueness of New York. 

We never make it easy for immigrants who are coming. But they find their way. And the same thing is going to happen here.

Many schools spent the earliest stages of the migrant crisis meeting basic needs. Now what do teachers and principals tell you is their biggest challenge in supporting new arrivals?

We’ve got over 5,000 teachers who are either bilingual or English-as-a-new-language teachers who are doing everything that they can possibly do. We need more. 

If you want to see New York City schools at their best, look at how these teachers have responded to the migrant crisis. It’s incredible. They’ve partnered kids with other kids who are serving as buddies for them. They’ve got mentors from older grades.

So I don’t hear a major cry from schools.

This administration has championed expanding popular programs to win back families, and celebrated last year’s enrollment uptick. But New York City has 186,000 fewer children and teenagers today than it did in 2020, and birthrates are on the decline. What does that mean for the future of the school system?

New York City is a very expensive place to live in. But we didn’t go from one million to 100,000. We still have over 900,000 kids and families.

Some of these things are happening beyond anything that I can do. There was a huge migration of Black folks back to the South. It’s more affordable for them to be in a place like South Carolina. Nothing I can do about that.

A big part of my job is to make the case for why we think the public schools would be a great place for you and your family. For years, the Department of Education used to play defense on media, the narrative. And I think we’re doing a better job with getting that word out.

GOOD JOB, CHANCELLOR BANKS!

Categories Bigotry, Education Reform, Funding, Immigration, New York City, Supporting public schools

Trump Serves Word Salad When Asked About His Plan to Help with Cost of Childcare

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2024 //
62

Trump spoke yesterday to the Economic Club of New York–an organization composed not of economists but of people who work in the financial sector (e.g. Wall Street). At the end of his speech, he took a few questions. The last one came from a woman who said that American families were worried about the high cost of childcare, costing as much as 20% of their income. She asked Trump what he would do to help families and what specific actions he would take.

His answer was rambling and incoherent. He never answered her question.

Lawrence O’Donnell played the full question and Trump’s answer last night. Watch at 18:00.

This is an unedited transcript of his response:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, and I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because, look, child care is child care is. Couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it – in this country you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly – and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Uh, those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.

We’re gonna have – I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about.

We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care, uh, is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

Even though he didn’t answer

Categories Childhood, Elections, Parents

The Wisdom of Arne Duncan (Not)

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2024 //
76

I kind of miss Arne Duncan. I miss reading the goofy things he said when he was Secretary of Education. Miguel Cardona doesn’t say anything so I can’t see what he is thinking. I seem to recall running contests for Arne’s funniest line. Some people liked his claim that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans (because it wiped out the NOLA public schools and enabled “reformers” to turn NOLA into an all-charter district.) My favorite happened when he visited a second grade classroom in NYC and said that he wanted to be able to look into their eyes and know that they were college-bound. Others preferred his statement that parents didn’t like standardized testing because they didn’t want to know how far behind their kids are. There were so many great choices.

Just recently, Arne added a new one, when he was interviewed by Rick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

Hess: I’m curious if there’s a time or issue during your tenure as secretary where you wish you could’ve had a do-over?

Duncan: I think the teacher-evaluation issue was one that I had hoped we could make more progress on, but teachers just felt beaten up over it. We had the union leaders on board, but they couldn’t convince their members that this would help them and strengthen their profession.

Gosh! Teachers could not be convinced to support value-added evaluation. Could it have been because this tactic failed to achieve its goals but demoralized teachers? Because the American Association of Statisticians said that the approach was inherently flawed because home effects are far more powerful than teacher effects? Because research funded by the Gates Foundation discovered no academic gains when VAM was implemented but teacher demoralization and teacher exodus increased? Because VAM was successful nowhere?

Categories Cardona, Miguel, Duncan, Arne, Humor

Moms4Liberty Meet and Embrace Trump, Of Course

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2024 //
5

The AP wrote about the annual conference of Moms for Liberty, where the guest speaker was convicted felon Donald Trump. The organization is supposed to be “non-political,” to preserve its tax-free status, but its partisan political views are undisguised. The rightwing group favors censorship, book banning, and unhinged alarmism about teachers “grooming” students to be gay or transgender.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In her welcoming remarks at Moms for Liberty’s annual gathering in the nation’s capital on Friday, the group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, urged members to “fight like a mother” against the Democratic presidential ticket.

Later that evening, after she had interviewed Republican nominee Donald Trump onstage, she made a point to say she was personally endorsing him for the presidency. Their talk show style chat was preceded by a “Trump, Trump, Trump” chant from the audience.

The weekend’s gathering, drawing parent activists from across the country, has showcased how Moms for Liberty has moved toward fully embracing Trump and his political messaging as November’s electiondraws nearer. The group is officially a nonpartisan nonprofit that says it’s open to anyone who wants parents to have a greater say in their children’s education, yet there was little pretense about which side of the nation’s political divide it has chosen.

A painting that was prominently displayed on an easel next to the security station attendees had to pass through before being allowed into the conference area showed Vice President Kamala Harris kneeling over a bald eagle carcass, a communist symbol on her jacket and her mouth dripping with blood. A Moms for Liberty spokeswoman said she hadn’t seen the gruesome painting and noted that the only official signage for the event included the group’s logo….

Many communities where Moms for Liberty candidates took over a majority of the school board have been frustrated by their laser-like focus on removing books, questioning lessons around race and rejecting LGBTQ+ identities. A lack of progress toward academic improvement has in turn led to a counter movement among more moderate and liberal parents and teachers unions.

Moms for Liberty says it won’t make an official endorsement in the presidential race, but it isn’t shying away from getting involved. The group’s founders recently wrote an open letter to parents warning that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school social studies teacher, would be “the most anti-parent, extremist government America has ever known.”

The group spent its first three years becoming synonymous with the “parents’ rights” movement in local school boards but recently has become more involved in national politics. It participated in the controversial conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration, Project 2025, as a member of its advisory board. The group also has invested more than $3 million in four crucial presidential swing states. The money has paid for advertising in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, including messages critical of the Biden administration.

But, here’s some good news:

Around the country, some school board members backed by Moms for Liberty or who carry out the group’s agenda have been recalled in recent months by community members who say their policies have caused chaos.

In Woodland, California, north of the state capital, a school board member backed by Moms for Liberty members was recalled in March after she raised fears that children were coming out as transgender “as a result of social contagion ” during a school board meeting in 2023.

In Southern California, a trustee with the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education was recalled after he and two of his colleagues voted to reject a social studies curriculum because it included a history of the gay rights movement.

And in Idaho’s heavily Republican panhandle, community members from across the political spectrum rose up to recall two right-wing members of their board last year who sought to root out critical race theory and institute a conservative agenda.

Katie Blaxberg, a Pinellas County candidate who will run against the one remaining Moms for Liberty-linked candidate for that county’s school board this fall, said the “nastiness” and “divisiveness” of the group “isn’t conducive to any sort of good wor

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Harris, Kamala, Trump

CNN: Musk’s Anti-Kamala Tweets Are Getting More Extreme

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2024 //
17

CNN called out Elon Musk for posting unhinged, misogynistic tweets about Kamala Harris. Twitter has been turned into a pro-Trump platform. Musk, the richest man in the world, is frightened that Kamala is a “communist” because she wants to lift up people who need housing, jobs, food security, a better quality of life. And, like JD Vance, he thinks that women are incapable of thinking or leading.

CNN wrote:

Elon Musk’s disdain for the Democratic Party was never subtle, but in recent weeks his commentary on the upcoming US presidential election and his attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris have intensified, aided by a crude use of burgeoning artificial intelligence technology.

On Monday, Musk posted an AI-generated image on his social media platform that depicted Harris as a communist, wearing a red uniform complete with hammer and sickle emblazoned hat.

Musk, who has endorsed former President Donald Trump for president and poured millions into a super PAC supporting the Republican, captioned the image with the false assertion, “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?”

The image, which appeared to violate X’s policy on manipulated content, resembled an AI-generated image posted by Trump last month during the Democratic National Convention, envisioning Harris addressing a crowd under communist symbols.

Musk’s post came a day after he shared another post with a screenshot suggesting that only “high status males” should be able to participate in government because women (and men with “low testosterone”) are not capable of critical thought. Musk posted it to his 196 million followers with the comment, “interesting observation.”

To complete the article, open the link.

Categories Education Reform
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