Orlando Sentinel to Zieglers: Resign! I Disagree.

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
26

Christian and Bridget Ziegler have been leaders of the extreme rightwing in Florida. They are (or were) close to Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump. But when they became ensnared in a sex scandal, they were exposed as rank hypocrites. Christian thus far insists he won’t step down as chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Bridget Ziegler was one of the three co-founders of Moms for Liberty, which led the fight to ban books about homosexuality and to harass transgender students. The website of Moms for Liberty now claims there were only two co-founders; she has been written out of their narrative. She’s a non-person. The editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel says it’s time for both of them to resign. Karma is a bitch.

The deepening troubles of Christian and Bridget Ziegler would be just another local news story if they were two private people. But they are highly public figures who are suddenly in a heap of trouble, and their sex life is in headlines.

He is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, close to both Gov. Ron DeSantis and former president Donald Trump. She is a nationally known conservative culture warrior, a Sarasota County School Board member and a co-founder of the book-banning Moms for Liberty, which denounces all things LGBTQ. She is also a DeSantis appointee to the Disney World oversight board.

Christian Ziegler is accused, though not formally charged, of raping a woman at her apartment in Sarasota. She told police of a previous three-way sexual encounter with both Zieglers and said she was “mostly in” for Bridget — not him.

Sarasota police and the Florida Trident — the reporting arm of the nonprofit Florida Center for Governmental Accountability — say Bridget Ziegler confirmed the previous threesome. They had recorded Christian Ziegler promising his accuser that there would be another. Text messages showed that the woman had told him not to come to her house without Bridget. He went there anyway and admits to having sex with her, but insists it was consensual.

DeSantis wants Ziegler out, but claims to be powerless to remove him. (To that we say: Since when has that stopped him?) So do other leading Republicans: Sen. Rick Scott, all three Cabinet members and both leaders of the state Legislature. Conspicuously missing from their statements are expressions of concern for the possible rape victim.

The state party vice chairman, Evan Power, has called a closed-door Dec. 17 executive committee meeting in Orlando to “censure or discipline” the chairman after Ziegler refused to call the meeting himself.

Bridget Ziegler remains on the school board, feeding the nationwide mockery over the blatant hypocrisy between her private life and her public preaching. She is also under pressure to resign.

The presumption of innocence

Christian Ziegler is legally innocent unless he’s convicted. There is nothing on the public record that Bridget Ziegler could be charged with, since hypocrisy is not a crime. Neither is a ménage à trois among consenting adults. Her virulent hatred for all things LGBTQ in public while conducting a bisexual tryst in private is damning only in the court of public opinion.

But the Zieglers show contempt for public opinion and for the Republican political machine that enriched them and made them prominent public figures. They should retire discreetly to private life while the criminal investigation proceeds.

Whether she can ever again be a credible member of a school board, or maintain any connection with Moms for Liberty, is in serious doubt. She should resign, too.

Even if she doesn’t, DeSantis clearly holds power over the position he gave her, on the board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Why hasn’t he yanked that appointment, or demanded that she step down?

“She is nothing but a distraction from before and only getting worse and it will never go away as long as she sits there,” fellow School Board member Tom Edwards told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

A pariah to the cause

Some organizations see the hypocrisy in the own ranks.

Moms for Liberty, its credibility further damaged, raced to distance itself from Ziegler and announced that she left its national leadership three years ago, even as she continued to propagate its ideology of intolerance.

She’s also been jettisoned from an organization that “trains conservatives.” Her latest financial disclosure form lists $64,101 in income from the Leadership Institute LLC in Arlington, Va., nearly twice her school board salary of $33,916. Until Wednesday, it listed her as vice president of its School Board Leadership Program. Her name disappeared later that day from the staff list…

Christian Ziegler, meanwhile, regurgitates the standard defense of influential men accused of sexual assault. He claims he’s the victim, if you can believe that.

‘A country to save’

“We have a country to save, and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for the process to wrap up,” he said.

Like Trump, who supported his election as party chair, and like DeSantis, whose slogan is “Never Back Down,” Ziegler advised a Moms for Liberty national conference to “Never apologize. Ever.” It was a reference to a Moms for Liberty chapter that apologized for using a quote from Adolf Hitler in its newsletter.

As a political strategist, he is ruthless. “Until we get every Democrat out of office and no Democrat considers running for office, we’re going to continue to step on the gas and move forward in Florida,” he said on X, formerly Twitter, last February, when he was elected party chairman.

Until no Democrat dares to run?

Across Florida, teachers are afraid to acknowledge to their students that same-sex relationships exist. Books are being taken off library shelves because they tell the truth about the modern implications of slavery and racism. Works of towering literary merit are being treated like smut because of brief passages describing sexual encounters. Teenaged victims of rape face the possibility that they will be forced to carry their attackers’ babies to term. Transgender Floridians are terrified they’ll lose access to the health care they depend upon.

This is the world the Zieglers helped to make. Now they should live by its narrow, hateful strictures.

I disagree with the editorial. Christian and Bridget committed no crime. He is a bully, but everyone knew that. Let him remain as the face of the state Republican Party. Bridget inveighed against the dangers of gay sex, but she indulged in it herself. She even harassed a member of the Sarasota school board because he is gay. She should remain on the school board and own up to her bisexuality. Maybe contrition will lead her to new views, inspire her to empathy, and enable her to retract her intolerance. We can always hope.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, DeSantis, Florida, Hypocrisy, Scandal, Trump

Peter Greene: Vouchers Are NOT “Saving Poor Kids from Failing Schools”

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
7

A quarter-century after the launch of vouchers in Milwaukee, we now know a lot that we didn’t know then. The sales pitch was always humanitarian: vouchers, said its rightwing advocates, would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Except they didn’t. We now know, writes Peter Greene, that vouchers do not save poor kids from failing schools. They are a subsidy for students who were already in private and religious schools. Maybe that was their purpose all along.

One other thing we have learned about vouchers: the first voucher program is for low-income kids, but it is the camel’s nose under the tent. The income restrictions will be raised again and again, and more groups of eligible students will be eligible for vouchers. And one day, there will be vouchers for everyone, without regard to income or need.

He writes:

Voucher program after voucher program is launched with the same promise–this program will rescue disadvantaged students from public schools that can’t get the job done. But now that they’ve been around for a few years, we can see pretty clearly what they actually do.

They expand.

They subsidize private school costs for families that were already in private schools.

Arizona’s program is growing into a state budget buster. New Hampshire’s state subsidy for private school tuition is mushrooming in just three years, and roughly 90% of the students using vouchers are still students who were already in private school. Iowa’s program cost looks to be tremendous, with 19,000 students approved for vouchers.

Arkansas is joining the crowd, and provides a fine example of how these programs grow and who they actually benefit.

Arkansas’s voucher program was set up to start with disabled and low-income students. One immediate effect has been a boom in the Fake Your Way To Disability industry in Arkansas, where options to “prove” your eligibility include “a note from your doctor.” And the Arkansas Times has learned that many students qualifying for vouchers didn’t not even clear that low bar. It’s a bit of a Catch-22, as students often have difficulty getting admitted to a private school if they have an IEP, 504 plan, or disability. Still, almost half of Arkansas’s voucher students were approved based on some sort of claim of disability.

That may contribute to Arkansas’s numbers– of its voucher users, 95% did not attend a public school last year.

And the program is only slated to expand as the bars for qualifying are lowered even further.

Proponents of vouchers, like Governor Reynolds of Iowa, point at the expansion and huge cost runs as signs that families were “hungry for educational freedom.” Well, no. What it shows is that families like free money from the state to help pay for the expenses they have already freely chosen for their children.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Lies, Vouchers

John Thompson: The Most Important Lesson That Students Need Today

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
21

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, write about what matters most to students today: learning to pay attention in a world of screens and distractions.

He writes:

D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt begin their New York Times opinion piece, “Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can fight Back,” with an eloquent version of a statement that should have long been obvious:

We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.

Then Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt use equally insightful language to explain why “We Can Fight Back” against “the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.” They recall that “for two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy.” Today we face widespread complaints that reading is being undermined by “perpetual distraction,” due to commercial use of digital technologies. They add, “What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”

“Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back” calls for a “revolution [which] starts in our classrooms.” They explain, “We must flip the script on teachers’ perennial complaint. Instead of fretting that students’ flagging attention doesn’t serve education, we must make attention itself the thing being taught.” They draw upon the work of “informal coalitions of educators, activists and artists who are conducting grass-roots experiments to try to make that possible. Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt call it “attention activism.

Due to these worldwide efforts, “common ground is rediscovered in the weave of collective attention.” They seek ways “to create, beyond the confines of our personalized digital universes, something resembling a shared world.” One set of starting places, museums, public libraries, universities, as well as classrooms, remind me of a time when I was a student, and the first half of my teaching career, when field trips were widely celebrated, and before critical thinking was subordinated to test prep.

“Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can fight Back” recommends another practice that I’ve long struggled with, “observations of absolutely whatever unfolds in the world,” in order pay “particular attention to the supposedly mundane … events that might under normal circumstances have gone unnoted.” It reminded me of a conversation with a student where we agreed that we don’t want to depend on beer or marijuana in order to fully appreciate a sunset. It was hard for me to later realize that I also took that shortcut in order to slow down and fully appreciate such beauty.

Next, I left my computer, and my dog and I got into our complicated new hybrid car to take a short ride to the park for a walk. Of course, the irony of driving to the walk is obvious. Then I figured out how to push the buttons for defrosting the window, rather than scrape the ice off. But then, technology taught me a new skill for paying attention to “normal circumstances” that had “gone unnoted.” I became enthralled the bubbles that broke loose from the coat of ice as it melted and dripped down the windshield. (Perhaps due to that experience, the park’s beautiful fall colors were even more awesome.)

Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt also reminded me of conversations I had had as a young Baby Boomer with family members, neighbors and other mentors. So many adults coached me on developing “inner directedness,” not “outer-directedness,” and to not be “like the Red River, a mile wide and a foot deep.” I was taught that my real goal shouldn’t be higher grades, but “learning how to learn.” And I’ll never forget the elementary school principal who took us to the junior high to watch Edward R. Murrow interviewing John Maynard Keynes, about the real purpose of school – which was not getting a job. Our goal should be learning how to learn how to be creative after technology reduced the workweek into 15 hours.

Of course, that hopefulness seems laughable today, but it brings us back to Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt and their diagnosis of why today’s technology has become so destructive. They linked to ATTENTION LIBERATION MOVEMENTS(or ALMS) that resist the “powerful new financial, commercial, and technological system that is commodifying human attention as never before.” It promotes “RADICAL HUMAN ATTENTION” to nurture “unrivaled access to the goodness of life;” and second, “that present circumstances present new and imperiling obstacles to human attentional capacities.” For instance, these bottom-up efforts seek to educate young people how, “We operate in a world in which attention is increasingly bought and sold. Bought and sold by powerful interests, pursuing wealth — pursuing ‘eyeballs,’” on screens.

And, of course, the subsequent undermining of inner-directedness, social ties, and critical thinking paved the way to today’s rightwing assault on democracy.

Although I was never as eloquent as Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt, but I’ve unsuccessfully advocated for their type of approach for a quarter of a century. My first encounter with a cell phone occurred the day after a gang-related murder when my students affiliated with the “Crips” stared at a new student, a “Blood,” who was secretly typing into a gadget I’d never seen before, who was requesting armed backup. Given the way that cell phones, predictably, increased violence and, predictably, undermined classroom instruction, I lobbied for our school to commit to regulating phones and engaging in cross-generational conversations about digital literacy and ethics.

Although I personally communicated with my students about “using digital technology,” but “not being used by it,” our school system refused to touch these issues. Before long, watching students who were glued to their phones, it seemed obvious we were also facing a crisis of loneliness, made much, much worse by screen time.

My personal experience thus gives me reasons for both hope and pessimism. Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt build on the same human community strengths that were crucial for me, and embraced by students in our phone-free classroom. But I can’t ignore the three decades of refusals by the systems I’ve worked with to tackle the challenge.

Then again, on the same day that the New York Times commentary was published, National Public Radio reported that California “joins a growing movement to teach media literacy.” The next day, the Washington Post called on parents to support a ban on smartphones. So, maybe the time is right for the wisdom of Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt, who make the case for “what democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”

Categories Education Reform, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Leonard Leo Is Pushing for Public Funding of Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
11

Leonard Leo is one of the most powerful people in the nation. Get to know him. He led the conservative lawyer’s group The Federalist Society. He personally prepared the list of judges for Trump’s selection to the Supreme Court. He can take credit for the appointment of dozens of federal judges in district courts and appellate courts. In tribute to his effectiveness, a Chicago businessman gifted him with $1.6 billion to use as he wished to advance conservatism.

Politico reports that Leonard Leo’s latest cause is promoting religious charter schools, which would be fully funded by the public. The target, which he hopes to demolish, is separation of church and state.

At issue is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma’s push to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the nation’s first religious school entirely funded by taxpayers. The school received preliminary approval from the state’s charter school board in June. If it survives legal challenges, it would open the door for state legislatures across the country to direct taxpayer funding to the creation of Christian or other sectarian schools.

Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, acknowledges that public funding of St. Isidore is at odds with over 150 years of Supreme Court decisions. He said the justices have misunderstood Thomas Jefferson’s intent when he said there should be a wall separating church and state, but that the current conservative-dominated court seems prepared to change course.

“Jefferson didn’t mean that the government shouldn’t be giving public benefits to religious communities toward a common goal,” he said. “The court rightly over the last decade or so has been saying, ‘No, look, we’ve got this wrong and we’re gonna right the ship here.’ ”

Behind the effort to change the law are Christian conservative groups and legal teams who, over the past decade, have been beneficiaries of the billion-dollar network of nonprofits largely built by Leo, the Federalist Society co-chairman.

Leo’s network organized multi-million-dollar campaigns to support the confirmation of most of the court’s six conservative justices. Leo himself served as adviser to President Donald Trump on judicial nominations, including those of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett…

“The Christian conservative legal movement, which has its fingerprints all over what’s going on in Oklahoma, is a pretty small, tight knit group of individuals,” said Paul Collins, a legal studies and politics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “They recognize the opportunity to get a state to fund a religious institution is a watershed moment,” said Collins, author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making, adding that“They have a very, very sympathetic audience at the Supreme Court. When you have that on the Supreme Court you’re going to put a lot of resources into bringing these cases quickly.”

In Oklahoma, the legal team representing the state’s virtual charter school board, the Alliance Defending Freedom, helped develop arguments that led to the end of Roe v. Wade. It is significantly funded by donor-advised funds that allow their patrons to keep their identities secret but which receive large amounts of money from Leo-aligned groups.

They include Donors Trust, often called the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement. In recent years, Donors Trust has been the largest single beneficiary of Leo’s primary dark money group, the Judicial Education Project. Donors Trust, in turn, gave $4 million to Leo’s Federalist Society in 2022, according to the IRS filings.

Since 2020, when Leo received a $1.6 billion windfall from Chicago electronics magnate Barre Seid, among the largest contributions to a political advocacy group in history, other groups funded by Leo’s network have become substantial contributors to ADF. For instance, Schwab Charitable Fund, which has given at least $4 million to ADF, received $153 million in 2021 from a new Leo-aligned nonprofit that received the Seid funding.

ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler said in an emailed statement that his group is defending the board “in order to ensure people of faith are not treated like second-class citizens.” Sechler, who said he “cannot predict” whether the case will land at the Supreme Court, did not comment on the group’s funding.

St. Isidore is represented by the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative, a legal clinic created by the law school at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, law professor Nicole Stelle Garnett has worked with St. Isidore from the start of its application process.

In the same timeframe, Garnett joined the board of the Federalist Society, where Leo is co-chairman. She also joined the advisory council of a Catholic University law school initiative funded by a $4.25 million anonymous gift directed by Leo, according to a March 2021 press release. Justice Samuel Alito is its honorary chairman.

The Notre Dame clinic’s director is another alumni of Leo’s network, Stephanie Barclay, an attorney who spent multiple years at another legal nonprofit named after a Catholic martyr where Leo sits on the board: the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

The clinic itself was announced a few monthsbefore the confirmation of Barrett, who was a Notre Dame law professor for 15 years. The June, 2020, announcement of the clinic’s creation stated that Barclay would take a leave of absence to clerk for Gorsuch during the same time period — 2021 and 2022 — that the group was working with the Oklahoma archdiocese on its St. Isidore application. In June of 2022, the court also overturned Roe; a month later, the clinic funded a trip for Justice Alito to be feted at a gala in Rome.

Clinic spokeswoman Kate Monaghan Connolly declined to say if Barclay has done any work on behalf of St. Isidore, including before, during or after her clerkship. The clinic declined comment on its funders.

The clinic “has defended the freedom of religion or belief for all people across a wide variety of projects,” including Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and an Apache tribe, said Monaghan.

As St. Isidore and its allies readied for legal battle, Farley said, Notre Dame brought in a corporate team at the law firm Dechert LLP, including Michael McGinley, who worked on selecting judicial nominees at the Trump White House at the time Leo was advising the president. McGinley clerked for Gorsuch when he was a 10th Circuit appeals judge and for Alito at the Supreme Court. He accompanied Gorsuch to his confirmation hearings. He is not employed by Notre Dame, said Connolly. He is working “pro bono” for St. Isidore, Farley said….

Those backing the St. Isidore application face a formidable array of critics and opponents. Charter schools are required by Oklahoma statute to be non-sectarian, and in its application, the archdiocese says the school would be part of the “evangelizing mission of the Church.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, says the proposed school violates both the U.S. and the state Constitution, and he is suing to stop it. Separately, a group of 10 plaintiffs including public school parents and faith leaders represented by groups including Americans for Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit warning that the creation of the school will erode a pillar of American democracy: the wall of separation between church and state.

The plaintiffs in that case are calling on the Oklahoma judge presiding over it, C. Brent Dishman, to recuse himself. Dishman sits on the board of the College of the Ozarks, an evangelical college that was represented by ADF in a suit against the Biden administrationover transgender bathroom policy.

The school’s detractors say the national implications of the dispute are not getting enough attention. They include Melissa Abdo, a practicing Catholic and school board member in Jenks, Oklahoma, and Robert Franklin, a Republican-appointed member of a state virtual charter school board who last summer voted against the school’s application.

If the law were to allow public funding of religious schools, legislatures in conservative states would come under immediate pressure to help bail out troubled religious school systems: Catholic and Protestant churches are shuttering due to significant declines in church attendance and financial support as Americans become increasingly secular.

The 1.8 million-student Catholic education system received a lifeline through the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the case of Carson v. Makin, which required states with voucher systems to help students afford private schools to allow the money to be spent on religious academies. The influx of public money was already helping the Catholic Church to stave off parish closings, according to a 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research studythat called vouchers “a dominant source of funding for many churches.”

“It’s not about the 500 kids. The game is to get this to the Supreme Court,” said Franklin. “If the court approves this, it changes everything” about public education in America, he said.

“It’s been extremely unsettling,” said Franklin, noting that the state already has six virtual schools to serve children of all faiths and that some of the school’s biggest backers, including Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, had previously bashed virtual learning as ineffective.

Please open the link to read the full article.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Elections, Funding, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump, Vouchers

Israeli Peace Activist: Teach Compassion, Not Hate

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
55

Christiane Amanpour interviewed Robi Damelin, an Israeli peace activist, about her organization’s work to replace hatred with compassion. Damelin’s teenage son was killed by a Palestinian sniper 21 years ago, and she has dedicated her life since then to building a parents group of both Israelis and Palestinians.

She advocates listening to the stories of others. She recognizes the terrible suffering of Palestinians, and she works with Palestinian friends to foster understanding.

The hope for the future of both Israelis and Palestinians lies with enlightened leadership, which neither side has now. Damelin remains steadfast in believing that change will come, built on a mutual desire to end the cycle of fear and death.

Damelin speaks for me, and I hope, for most people. She wants peace and dignity for all sides, and an end to shouting and hatred, which only breeds more shouting and hatred.

Please watch the interview. It is inspiring.

Categories Equity, History, Hope, International, Love

Alexandra Petri: If You Need Medical Advice in Texas, Call State Atty-General Ken Paxton

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
13

Kate Cox of Dallas, Texas, learned recently that the baby she is carrying has a genetic condition that is typically deadly, trisomy 18. She asked a court to allow her to have an abortion, and the judge agreed to permit the abortion (the judge is female).

But Ken Paxton, the State Attorney General, has threatened to punish any doctor and hospital that participate in the abortion. The Texas Supreme Court issued a temporary injunction blocking an abortion. Fox has had two caesarean births and fears that she may never be able to conceive again if forced to deliver a baby that has little chance of survival.

Who decides? Kate Cox’s doctor? Ken Paxton? The Texas Supreme Court?

Alexandra Petri, humorist for The Washington Post, comments on Paxton’s intervention:

“Judge Guerra Gamble is not medically qualified to make this determination and it should not be relied upon. A TRO is no substitute for medical judgment.”

— Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, writing to doctors who have received a court order allowing an abortion to end a nonviable pregnancy

There is no substitute for medical judgment, except the judgment of me, Ken Paxton.

Am I a doctor? No. I’m something better than a doctor: a Ken. My accessories include: no medical expertise and a boundless reservoir of cruelty. And one time, I saw a horse. I have also been told that my handwriting is bad and that I am not patient. This all screams “doctor” to me.

If we were on a plane or in a theater and someone yelled, “There is an emergency! Is there a doctor in the house?” I would absolutely raise my hand. “I am a man in a position of political authority in Texas happy to make life hell for all pregnant people. In the state of Texas, that’s better than a doctor!”

Indeed, the process for obtaining an abortion in Texas is simple. All you have to do is get a recommendation from your doctor that one is medically necessary, hire a legal team, get your case in front of a judge and obtain a court order! And then a man named Ken gets to say, “No! Let’s take this to the Supreme Court. Also, if you proceed, I will threaten your doctors!” And then the Texas Supreme Court gets to affirm Ken’s preference and halt your order. Simple. Routine. Elegant.

Texas Supreme Court temporarily halts order that allows pregnant woman to have an abortion

“This seems like a horrible, ghoulish way to behave when a person needs to access emergency medical care,” you might say. Sure! But we are not talking about a person in this case. We are talking about a woman. Totally different, in my medical opinion.

Am I a doctor? Look, I’ve always felt that nothing should limit what you can be or do, except the objections of a man named Ken in the state of Texas. Well, I’m a man named Ken in the state of Texas, and I think I am probably a doctor. And the state Supreme Court agrees.

I mean, of course, in all ways that count (chiefly, I get to make medical decisions for you), I am a doctor. Actually, maybe it would even be better if I weren’t! That would keep me from being unduly hidebound and unimaginative when faced with questions like: Which pregnancies are viable? Which are life-threatening? For too long, we’ve been constrained by what was medically possible. No more. I always try to bring an open mind and lots of questions. Should blood really be inside the body rather than outside? Maybe, instead of an epidural, we should try prayer? If a body has a uterus, then is there any room in it for legal rights? Questions of that kind!

What I don’t know about women’s health could fill a book! A book that I would refuse to read, on principle.

I am a small-government conservative. I believe that the government should be so small that it can fit into your uterus and make all medical decisions for you. Don’t try to expel it! That’s not allowed. Not in Texas! I am not a doctor, but, as a doctor, I will tell you: It is not medically safe.

I can’t believe that these judges are trying to interfere in a medical decision, as we have forced them to do under Texas state law. The effrontery! The gall! A substance I believe that I know a lot about, from my years practicing medicine! It’s what the brain is made of!

TO BE CLEAR, I AM TECHNICALLY NOT A DOCTOR, but I do get mad when people call Jill Biden one. I am only not a doctor in the sense that I haven’t been to medical school, was never a resident and think that there is a strong chance babies are carried by storks. Teach the controversy! I also have not read an anatomy book. (I hear they contain inappropriate pictures! More information requested from those in the know!) But in every other sense, I am a doctor: I am a male Republican Texan in a position of authority.

Want an abortion? In Texas, we believe in bodily autonomy and control over your medical choices. For me, Ken. Not for you, yourself. You can’t be trusted with it! But don’t worry. In Texas, there is no substitute for medical judgment. Oh, sorry! Typo. In Texas, there is no (substitute for medical judgment). The “No!” is from me, Ken Paxton.

Categories Gender, Health, Stupid, Texas

Virginia: The Long Forgotten Story of the Danville Massacre of 1883

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
4

Many states have passed laws that ban the teaching of accurate history. Sometimes these laws ban “divisive concepts,” some ban anything that might cause students to feel uncomfortable, some find other language to warn teachers and textbook publishers to omit the shameful events of the past, especially the racist treatment of people of color.

In Florida, where the state went to great lengths to whitewash the teaching of Black history, one man has devoted himself to telling the truth. That man is Dr. Marvin Dunn. Dr. Dunn was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Network for Public Education. In the meanwhile, you can read his book A History of Florida Through Black Eyes.

In response to Dr. Dunn’s moving presentation, a friend of NPE sent me the following article about the Danville Massacre of 1883. We now know that Reconstruction was a period of impressive racial progress. Formerly enslaved people voted, opened small businesses, and asserted their newly won rights.

But the former Confederates found this rebalancing of racial relationships intolerable. The Danville Massacre put an end to a period of reconciliation and installed Jim Crow, cancelling out the gains of Reconstruction.

The author of the article could not remember learning about this important event in the state’s history.

Learning the truth about history doesn’t make children uncomfortable. It makes them informed.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Extremism, Fake, History, Virginia

National Education Policy Center: Closing the Gap Between Research and Practice in the Teaching of Reading

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
20

The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado posted a useful analysis of research in the field of reading and how it should inform practice.

Key Takeaway: Some research claims of the “science of reading” movement are overly simplistic, so policymakers should seek different approaches to legislating reading.

Find Documents:

Publication Announcement: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication-announcement/2022/09/science-of-reading
NEPC Publication: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

Contact:

Alex Molnar: (480) 797-7261, nepc.molnar@gmail.com
Faith Boninger: (480) 390-6736, fboninger@gmail.com
Paul Thomas: (864) 294-3386, paul.thomas@furman.edu

Learn More:

NEPC Resources on Reading Instruction

BOULDER, CO (September 13, 2022) – How students learn to read and how reading is best taught are often the focus of media, public, and political criticism. In a new NEPC policy brief, The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction, Paul Thomas of Furman University explores the controversial history of the reading reform movement.

Throughout the decades, a striking amount of attention has sporadically been focused on how teachers teach reading—typically with a specific concern for phonics instruction. This attention has then spread to standardized test scores (including international comparisons) and a changing list of hypothetical causes for disappointing test scores (including progressivism, whole language, and balanced literacy).

Disappointing reading achievement has been sometimes attributed to how reading is taught, sometimes to social influences on students (such as technology and media), and sometimes to both. Widespread and ongoing criticism over the last 80 years has targeted a wide array of culprits:

  • State and federal reading policy;
  • The quality of teacher education and teacher professional development;
  • Theories of learning to read and reading instruction;
  • The role of phonics and other reading skills in teaching reading; and
  • The persistent gaps among classroom practices, reading policy, and the nature or application of science and research.

These discussions have not been evidence-free. In fact, scholars and literacy educators have over this time conducted extensive research into these and other issues. But the research has only limited impact on policy and practice.

Specifically, in contrast to much of the public debate and policymaking, these researchers have found reading instruction and learning to be complex, complicating the design of effective policy and classroom practice. Overall, this robust research base supports policies and approaches that acknowledge a range of individual student needs and that argue against “one-size-fits-all” prescriptions. Among literacy educators and scholars, then, important reading debates continue but do so without any identified silver-bullet solutions.

The current public debate is different. Since 2018, the phrase “science of reading” has been popularized as loosely defined shorthand for the broad and complex research base characterizing how children learn to read and how best to teach reading. Simplifying the issue for the public and for political readers, and failing to acknowledge the full complement of research findings, prominent members of the education media have used the term when framing the contemporary debate—often as pro-phonics versus no phonics. Various types of vendors have also found the shorthand term “science of reading” highly useful in branding and marketing specific phonics-oriented reading and literacy programs.

As the “science of reading” movement has grown, scholars have cautioned that advocates and commercial vendors often exaggerate and oversimplify both the problems and solutions around reading achievement and instruction. Yet these advocates have been extremely effective in lobbying for revised and new phonics-heavy reading legislation across most states in the U.S., producing rigid and ultimately harmful policy and practices. Still, in pursuing reform to address identified challenges, the movement does provide an opportunity for policymakers to investigate different approaches to reading instruction and to develop more nuanced policy.

Accordingly, Professor Thomas provides recommendations for state and local policymakers to provide teachers the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs.

Find The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction, by Paul Thomas, at: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

Categories Education Reform, Literacy, Research, Teachers and Teaching

Why Did Americans Abandon the Greatest Economy in History?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
43

This excellent article in The Atlantic by Rogé Karma should be widely read. Something changed radically in our economy and our society in the past several decades, limiting access to “the American Dream.” He explores the reasons why.

He writes:

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition…

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes…

The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

In the remainder of the article, the author says that the nation is at an inflection point, ready for a change. But what that change will be determined by voters next year.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Elections, History, Racism, Republicans

Gayle Greene: Higher Education and the Triumph of Hype Over Experience

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2023 //
66

Recently, I have read alarming articles about state universities eliminating majors in the humanities as a cost-cutting measure while expanding departments that grant degrees in computer science, business, and other job-related fields. Just last week, The Atlantic published an article about the downsizing of foreign languages, linguistics, and other majors at the University of West Virginia, even though the state has a surplus of nearly $2 billion. Other universities are cutting majors in history, the arts, and political science in favor of majors that enhance immediate employability.

Gayle Greene, professor emerita at Scripps College in Claremont, California, contends that such actions are short-sighted. Today—in a world of disinformation, fake news, and Artigiani intelligence—we need the humanitities more than ever so we can discern and weigh facts and reality. In this essay , she shows how tech titans like Bill Gates have encouraged the destructive trend of favoring job-ready degrees.

Greene writes:

“College is remade as tech majors surge and humanities dwindle,” announces Nick Anderson in the Washington Post, May 2023. “Remade” is an understatement, when more students today are majoring in computer science than in all the humanities– English, history, philosophy, languages, the arts— combined. And what for? In the past year, tech has laid off more than 200,000 workers, with more layoffs predicted.

 

There was a chorus of Cassandras warning against this remake: do not whittle education down to preparation for jobs that might not exist in a decade; do not sacrifice the humanities to STEM. But the hype was so loud, it drowned out the warnings. The STEM skills shortage was broadcast by business leaders, lobbyists, politicians, think tanks, media, and especially by Bill Gates, who spread the word far and wide. He announced to Congress, in 2008, “U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.” Obama echoed him in his 2012 State of the Union Address: “I hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the U.S. but can’t find workers with the right skills.” Obama reiterated the message in his 2011, 2013, and 2016 State of the Union Addresses, announcing, in 2013 a competition “to redesign America’s high schools,” rewarding those developing STEM classes to deliver “the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”

 

The hype was hot air. “If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising” rather than staying flat as they have “for the past 16 years,” wrote Ron Hira et al in USA Today, 2014. Obama might have heeded him or Andrew Hacker, Ben Tarnoff, Matt Bruenig, Michael Teitelbaum, Gerald Coles, Walter Hickey, Michael Anft, who raised similar alarms. Or Paul Krugman, who warned, “the belief that America suffers from a severe ‘skills gap’ is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true”; it’s “a zombie idea… that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.”

 

When an idea persists against all evidence, you have to ask: who profits? A 2012 Microsoft publication warned that the U.S. faces “a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating”—even though, in the summer of 2014, Microsoft laid off about 18,000 workers. Other companies,Boeing, IBM, Symantec, were also laying off thousands, sometimes rehiring them at lower salaries, even as they lamented the “lack of qualified applicants,” wrote Hacker.

 

The problem for a company like Microsoft has not been a lack of skilled workers, but that U.S. tech workers expect to be well paid. Foreign tech workers in the U.S. make about 57% what their U.S. counterparts make. Hence the tech industry’s push for easier immigration policies and H-1B visas, visas that allow U.S. businesses to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty work like IT. If we don’t ease up on immigration policies, Gates told Congress in 2008, “American companies simply will not have the talent they need to innovate and compete.” Hence Gates’spush for coding and computer classes in schools and colleges. “Nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers,” wrote Tarnoff, “and where better to develop this workforce than America’s schools.”

 

The STEM skills shortage was the PR of an industry wanting a large pool of workers ready to work for less, an industry with enormous lobbying power. The campaign has been so successful that now hundreds of thousands of trained workers are newly unemployed in a market flooded by as many as qualified as they. It’s succeeded in bending higher education to its purposes, re-directing it to training for jobs, with tech jobs the most hyped–even though tech comprise less than 8% of the economy. Colleges and universities direct resources that way, private donors pour enormous sums that way, and students follow the money and the buzz, whatever their interests and talents. Humanities enrollments have plummeted, courses, programs, departments have been gutted, and tenured faculty let go.

 

But what even the most dire of Cassandras failed to see, even those working in AI, was the seismic upheaval AI was about to create.

 

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Obama might have been more cautious about dismantling an educational system that’s served the U.S. so well, a system widely believed to have been the engine of this country’s power and productivity. The U.S. still has the universities that rank highest internationally and have world-wide draw, in spite of the assaults higher education has lately endured. But he went ahead and based his educational policies on the vision of a technocrat (Gates’ word for himself) who sees the purpose of education as making a workforce that will allow U.S. industries “to compete in the global economy,” as Gates said in Waiting for Superman, 2010, a public-school-bashing documentary film he funded and starred in. Obama turned his education department over to the Gates foundation, as Lindsey Layton documented in the Washington Post, 2014: “top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped theadministration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation.”

 

With K-12, Obama uncritically adopted No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the test and assess regime George W. Bush inflicted on public schools in 2002 in the name of “reform”—even though NCLB was an acknowledged disaster by the time Obama took office. Schools could be closed if test scores declined— many were closed, especially in underprivileged areas, where kids don’t test well—which left teachers no choice but to teach to the test and strip curricula of subjects not tested, including literature, history, philosophy, the arts, languages, social sciences. The panic about test scores made a boondoggle for new ventures supplying materials for test- prepping, test-administering, test-scoring, and assessing. In fact, what test scores most reliably measure is how well kids take tests, which penalizes students from disadvantaged backgrounds and makes a mockery of claims that testing levels the playing field, the rationale for so-called reform.

 

Obama tightened the screws on Bush’s program, requiring states to agree to certain conditions to qualify for federal funding, each of them high on the Gates agenda. States had to agree to make room for more charter schools, and they did—more charters were founded on Obama’s watch than Bush’s. Gates claims that charters will create “choice” and “competition” and incentivize teachers to raise test scores. In fact they have not raised test scores, though they have succeeded in routing public funding to private interests, as they were meant to. States also had to agree to adopt a standardized curriculum. This came in the form of the Common Core State Standards, Gates’ brainchild, which wedded teaching even more closely to testing, assessing, and technology, since standardized material is easily computer-administered and scored. The Common Core has reduced reading and writing to decontextualized skills — “find the main point,” “identify the figures of speech”— which has been a major turnoff for kids. The moaning we hear lately about declining test scores is beside the point: the point is that kids are massively alienated from school because “drill, kill, bubble fill” is all they’re fed.

 

Gates has admitted that transforming K-12 is harder than he’d anticipated: “We really haven’t changed outcomes” (i.e. test scores). But he should not underestimate his impact. His perpetuation of the broken-public-schools narrative, his attack on teachers and tenure, his imposition of mechanization and measurement on an enterprise he knows nothing about, have driven teachers out of the profession in record numbers, with few lining up to take their places. Teachers have written and spoken against the Common Core, forming advocacy groups to resist it, and tens of thousands of parents have opted their kids out of testing— but the machine rolls on. The foundation “has influence everywhere, in absolutely every branch of education…federal, state, local,” with politicians, journalists, administrators, think tanks, summarizes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute.

 

Higher education has been harder to get hold of, on account of the respect it commands throughout the world. But harping on its failures to meet market needs has done much to skew it the Gates way. “The [Gates] foundation wants nothing less than to overhaul higher education, changing how it is delivered, financed, and regulated,” wrote Marc Parry, Kelly Field, and Becky Supiano, in a brilliant expose, “The Gates Effect.” It “would like college to be cheaper, more accessible, and more targeted towards the specific skills desired by employers. Instead of a broad education where a college student might take courses across a range of subjects, the new model has students demonstrating ‘competencies’ by passing tests in specific areas, and receiving a certificate upon completion.” Thefoundation “hasn’t just jumped on the bandwagon,” the authors conclude; “it has worked to build that bandwagon.”

 

And its stranglehold on mainstream media is murderous. As with K-12, “Gates buys up everyone and engineers the appearance of a consensus,” writes Diane Ravitch. Ravitch was in the first Bush education department and a proponent of No Child Left Behind, but turned against it when she realized its purpose was to route public resources to private interests; she has been a powerful advocate for public schools ever since. As with K-12, “the foundation has bought the research, bought the evaluations, bought the advocacy groups, and bought the media to report on what the foundation is doing. It has lavished support on education journals, while also saturating them with ads and ‘sponsored’ articles.” As with K-12, this creates the sense of a hue and cry from many quarters, of widespread agreement that higher education is broken, resists change, resists innovation, needs technology, needs to produce more STEM workers.

 

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Fifty years ago, the humanities had a “national mandate,” writes Nathan Heller in a widely read New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major,” February 2023. The liberal arts had pride of place. Now the mandate has moved to STEM, with more than a little push from business interests keen to transform higher education to job preparation and right-wing anti-education agendas.

 

In 2013, Obama’s administration produced a “Scorecard,” an online tool to show “folks” where they can get “the most bang for the buck,” as he promised in his 2013 State of the Union address. The Scorecard has Gates’ fingerprints all over it. It ranks colleges according to number of graduates, speed to graduation, starting salaries, time taken to pay back student loans—which makes a college rise higher in the rankings for graduating a hedge fund manager than a teacher. And higher education has cooperated, inviting managerial administrators in to make education “more like business,” lean, mean, and cost effective. They’ve stripped away courses and programs with no “real world” value and cut back in areas they deem inessential— like teaching, which has been turned over to part-timers or online programs, while tenured faculty are let go, and with them, tenure. Administrators hire more administrators, offices and functionaries proliferate, and academia is saddled with a top-heavy bureaucracy that drains resources. Then along comes a pandemic that cuts into college enrolments and devalues any enterprise without immediate utilitarian value—and here we are. The humanities are beyond crisis; they’re “on life support,” writes James Engell, Harvard Magazine, February.

 

And the STEM bandwagon rolls on, powered by Gates lobbying, onto the floor of Congress, where the Higher Education Act, the federal law governing crucial policies such as accreditation and standards that qualify colleges for financial aid, is overdue for reauthorization. In May 2019, the Gates foundation established a new lobbying group, “Commission on the Value of Postsecondary Education,” to make sure Congress understands the “value” of postsecondary education, “value” defined in terms of graduates’ salaries and social mobility. Prior to this lobbying group, the foundation exerted its influence from behind the scenes, but launching a 501c (4) nonprofit enables them to “talk directly with legislators about laws,”explains Nick Tampio. In May 2021, the Commission published a 117-page report, Equitable Value: Promoting Economic Mobility and Social Justice through Postsecondary Education, which spells out elaborate systems of measurement and assessment to make sureschools render dollar for dollar return on investment. The foundation is now in a position to assure that federal funding gets routed to majors leading to jobs Gates sees as vital to the economy.

 

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In 2018, Benjamin Schmidt cautioned against remaking higher ed to meet alleged market needs because nobody could predict what jobs would look like in ten years. Now, with AI to do the work of many humans, we might ask what jobs will look like in ten months. In March, Goldman Sachs released a report estimating that “generative AI may expose 300 million jobs to automation,” work that “might be reduced or replaced by AI systems,” summarizes Benj Rfestfd in Ars Technica. An insider, “Scott,” comments on a NYT article, March 28, on likely effects of GPT (“generative pre-trained transformers” that produce human-like text and images):

 

As a software entrepreneur who is part of a think tank that studies AI, I can tell you that GPT is not overhyped… it impacts every job from manufacturing to knowledge work, and with some imagination even agriculture, food production and restaurants… People are focusing on a single job? You should start thinking of entire professions, industries and companies (thousands of which GPT will put out of business this year). Our politics are not ready for the disruption, deflation and unemployment.

 

“We have summoned an alien intelligence,” write Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin in the NYT in March. Our first contact with AI, they note, the relatively simple manipulation of attention by social media, was catastrophic: it “increased societal polarization, undermined our mental health and unraveled democracy.” What comes next is anybody’s guess, but a lot of people are worried, including more than a thousand tech leaders and researchers who signed an open letter in March calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of GPT, citing its “profound risks to society and humanity.”

 

“It’s a completely different form of intelligence,” says Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” who resigned from Google so he could speak freely; and it’s likely to be “much more intelligent than us in the future.” It has the capacity to flood the internet with fake images and misinformation so convincing that we may “not be able to know what is true anymore”—which is dire for democracy. There are calls for regulation, including from Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the company that created GPT-4: “the current worries I have are of disinformation problems, economic shocks, or something else at a level far beyond anything we’re prepared for.”

 

Meanwhile the titans, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, are out of the gate, racing for the spoils.

 

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How to deal with an alien intelligence that’s faster and smarter than we are? Killing the humanities has left us a bit understaffed in this department. By eliminating subjects that might teach us about ourselves and our fellow beings, we’re exacerbating the problems confronting society. Misinformation and conspiracy fantasies flourish, racism and hate crimes are on the rise, along with mortality rates, not only from Covid but “deaths of despair.” Quality of life in the U.S. has plummeted.

 

Many people fear that the STEM craze may be turning out graduates ignorant of the past and their world, ill equipped for the challenges of an increasingly uncertain future. Spending one’s college years mastering the practical skills of a specialized field does not cultivate a broad understanding of the world. Minds need to be developed all around, if they are to “understand human behavior” and achieve “emotional intelligence and mental balance”— the capacities Yuval Harari says young people most need as they face dizzying change. They’ll need, above all, ”the ability to keep changing,” qualities of adaptability and versatility cultivated by the kind of education we’ve trashed.

 

“Major in being human,” David Brooks advises young people who are wondering where to turn with AI threatening to steal their futures. Ask yourself, “which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human?” Gravitate toward classes that will help you develop “distinctly human skills… that unleash your creativity, that give you a chance to exercise and hone your imaginative powers.” That would be the humanities, small, discussion-based classes where students learn about the past and creations of their kind, about what humankind has been and might be; where they learn to articulate their positions and see that others have positions too, that they can disagree yet get along—which goes a way toward learning to live in society. Find the human, urges Douglas Rushkoff in Team Human, and find the others who can help us resist the anti-human agenda and “restore the social connections that make us fully functioning humans.”

 

The stakes are high. A 2020 study, “The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes,” found that in all the countries surveyed, higher education correlated with resistance to authoritarianism, but it made the greatest difference in the United States, on account of our unique system of general education based in the liberal arts. Yet this is the system we’re letting go. Authoritarianism thrives on misinformation, on simplistic, us-them thinking. Democracy requires that people deal with complexity, think, question, interpret, inquire, sort out information from misinformation, push back against agendas being pushed on us, take nothing on authority. It requires that people know how to read their world, interpret, evaluate, inquire, consider context and consequences, and know how to seek sources other than social or corporate media. Decoding has a longer shelf life than the coding Gates is pushing. It’s crucial to democracy –and to employability, it turns out, since skills alone become rapidly obsolete.

 

To disinvest in the humanities is to disinvest in the human, to give up on the hope of a livable world and more humane future. Which is why it’s urgent to resuscitate the humanities and not outsource our humanity to Hal.

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Gayle Greene is Professor Emerita, Scripps College, Claremont, CA. Her most recent book is Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), which makes a case for the humanities by actually showing what goes on in a small discussion class.

Gaylegreene.org

Categories Budget Cuts, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Higher Education, Technology
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