Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld writes that the legislature is taking aim again at the teachers’ unions. With a supermajority, the Republicans are set to erode the organized voice of teachers, whose unions fund Democrats. He writes:
I have to pull out the Henry Adams quote at least once every session of the Indiana General Assembly: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
How else do you explain Senate Bill 486, an “education deregulation” bill that seems to be largely about punishing the Indiana State Teachers Association and the Indiana Federation of Teachers.
The measure does include some deregulation, but a key component would repeal current law that gives teachers, through their unions, a voice in how their schools operate. Blocking it has become the top priority for the ISTA and IFT, which brought hundreds of teachers to the Statehouse last week to protest.
Why would the Republican supermajority want to punish the unions? Well, because they support Democrats. The ISTA’s political action committee spent over $1 million in the 2022 election year, much of it to assist Democratic legislative candidates. No one else comes close when it comes to supporting the party.
The GOP has chipped away at union strength since they took control of all branches of state government 13 years ago. A big blow came in 2011, when lawmakers decreed that collective bargaining could cover only salaries and pay-related fringe benefits, not working conditions. They have also adopted so-called right-to-work rules and outlawed “fair share fees” for teachers who won’t pay for union benefits.
FOX “News” posted a slanderous, absurd, dim-witted article about public schools, based on the complaints of a rightwing fringe group group called “No Left Turn in Education.” This group specializes in scare tactics and has a long list of books that they think should be banned.
In their eyes, educating “the whole child” is a nefarious plot to take away the role of parents. Social and emotional learning—like teaching children to be kind, to be considerate of others, to talk instead of fight—is insidious. No wonder people who watch FOX nonstop turn to homeschooling or religious schools, where their kids will get an inferior education.
FOX reports:
Educators at over 120 districts across the country are implementing a pervasive school curriculum that has been denounced by opponents as an effort to manipulate children’s values and beliefs and replace parents as the primary moral authority in their child’s lives, with many critics specifically pointing to similarities with programs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a major point of contention.
The School Superintendent’s Association (AASA), with the help of superintendents, board members and school administrators, is implementing the Learning 2025 program, which calls for an equity-focused, “holistic redesign” of the United States’ public education system by 2025, in districts across the country
The parents’ advocacy group, No Left Turn in Education (NLTE), is sounding the alarm about the curriculum’s alleged ties to the CDC, especially since Learning 2025 outlines its plans as a solution to the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Learning 2025 frequently references the idea of a “Whole Child” educational framework to promote the notion that school districts should focus on a collective, whole community vision that is strikingly similar to the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) educational framework devised by the CDC.
Both programs place a strong emphasis on students’ and teachers’ social and emotional health, including employee wellness programs, as well as psychological and social services like school-based health and counseling centers.
NLTE Chief Operating Officer Melissa Jackson said Learning 2025 is just a new way to make money on the same CDC product because “the components are still the same” with the emphasis on utilizing the community to influence and curate the “Whole Child” and their personal ideals beyond reading, writing and arithmetic.
The CDC’s “Whole Child” approach places its focus on psychological counseling and social services for students and teachers to further the “collaboration between education leaders and health sectors to improve each child’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development,” which is often referred to as social emotional learning (SEL).
SEL is advertised as a way to teach students social skills in support of their mental health and emotional wellbeing, but it has been criticized as a way to implement controversial topics like Critical Race Theory and Gender Theory. As a result, it has become a point of contention among parents, teachers and politicians who advocate for a strong academic emphasis at school and against classroom discussions that they feel should be left up to parents’ discretion at home.
NLTE refers to SEL as “socially engineered learning” because instead of placing the emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic, they argue it moves the focus away from academics to center on higher cognitive skills, like self-awareness, empathy and control of emotions.
When reached for comment, the CDC told Fox News Digital that Learning 2025 “is not a CDC program,” but a document about the program indicates a connection between the CDC and AASA.
“AASA is using the new model with our superintendent cadre,” a document about the CDC’s Whole Child program states. “We’ve updated all of our coordinated school health training materials to include the new model as the model for coordinated school health” and “We’ve created a booster session and updated training materials to reflect the WSCC [CDC] model.”
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been criticized and mocked from all sides after a series of muddled messages have baffled Americans amid a record surge in COVID-19 cases and the spread of the omicron variant. (iStock) (iStock)
NLTE’s Chief Research Officer Apryl Dukes pointed out that most people abided by the rules of the CDC and shut down when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, but she doesn’t believe their framework is the answer to getting students back on track.
“Learning 2025 is [billed as] the answer to what has happened to the children,” but “the root of the problem is not the COVID shutdown … goes back to the attack on culture,” Dukes said.
“I have a problem accepting a program from the very same people that caused the problem,” she added. “That’s what I want parents to know, is that these organizations were part of it, and now they’re offering you a solution to the problem.”
Holly Terei serves as NLTE’s National Director of Teacher Coalition and attended a Learning 2025 conference last summer, where she observed the curriculum’s framework in action. She said she also noticed the similarities between Learning 2025 and the CDC model.
The article goes on with more baloney, fear-mibgering, and lies. Parents who believe this garbage are being programmed to distrust and hate public schools.
Florida legislators are about to enact a bill that criminalizes or punishes anyone who aids or hires undocumented immigrants. One of the new crimes was giving a ride to an immigrant. Church leaders loudly complained that they would not be allowed to pick up immigrants and take them to church.
A Florida House panel advanced a revised bill that no longer makes it a felony crime to knowingly transport someone without legal status within Florida.
“If it’s within the state of Florida, they are not held liable to any wrongdoing,” said Rep. Kiyan Michael, R-Jacksonville, the bill’s sponsor.
Sister Ann Kendrick, who founded the Hope CommUnity Center in Apopka that helps Central Florida’s immigrant families, was among those calling for lawmakers to reconsider the bill.
“I cart people around all the time who are undocumented,” she said. “I’ll go to jail for… helping a kid? Wow, isn’t that the American way?”
Now here is a surprising turn of events. The billionaire funders of charter schools see them as a way to crush teachers’ unions. More than 90% of charters nationwide are non-union. Teachers in them have no rights and there is high teacher attrition.
But teachers at BASIS in Tucson voted to unionize, the first to do so in Arizona. BASIS is owned by its founders, Michael and Olga Block, and operates for profit. Anyone may apply but all students must pass multiple AP exams to graduate. The BASIS schools do not reflect the demography of the state. They have small numbers of Hispanic Americans and Native Americans, and large proportions of whites and Asian Americans. They are regularly ranked among the “best” high schools by US News.
Channel 12, KPNX IN Tucson reported:
A Tucson charter school recently voted to become the first unionized charter school in the state.
Author: William Pitts
TUCSON, Ariz. — A Tucson charter school has become the first charter school in Arizona to unionize.
BASIS Tucson North teachers voted Wednesday to form a teacher’s union.
The union will be represented by the American Federation of Teachers.
It’s the first time a charter school in Arizona has voted to form a union to negotiate with the owners of the school.
“We are managed by a private company with opaque finances,” teacher and union organizer Trudi Connolly said. “We completely believe that they have the ability to make more money available to the individual schools that they, in theory, manage.”
BASIS is a multistate charter school company that began in Arizona. It’s privately owned and for-profit. Connolly said she believes the company could do better by its teachers.
As for whether other Arizona charter schools could follow their lead, Connolly said she believes others, including other BASIS schools, might organize.
“We feel that if we can do this, others will see that they can too,” Connolly added.
Gary Rayno of InDepth NH is a reliable guide to education politics in New Hampshire. In this post, he describes the decisions that legislators must grapple with starting this week. New Hampshire public schools and public colleges have never been adequately funded, and the state has the misfortune of having a state commissioner who doesn’t care. He homeschooled his own children, and he doesn’t understand why the state pays for public schools.
He begins:
In New Hampshire, public education is a moving target.
It is a hodgepodge of activities and systems from pre-Kindergarten to its colleges and universities.
But the one unifying force along the spectrum is the state’s minuscule financial commitment.
The state’s contributions to public education puts it in line with states like Mississippi and Louisiana although its per capita wealth averages among the highest in the country.
One district has challenged the state in court, claiming that the state does not provide enough funding for an adequate education. State Commissioner Frank Edelblut doesn’t want any new money for public schools, but he’s quite willing to spend more on vouchers (so-called “education freedom accounts”.) The state contends that only the legislature—not the court—can determine funding for the schools.
To date the program is far more expensive than Edelblut advised lawmakers it would be, about $3.3 million this biennium, when the costs to date are well north of $20 million, much of that money paying tuition subsidies to parents whose children were in private and religious schools and homeschooling programs before the EFA program began.
The program was sold as allowing low-to-moderate income parents to find the best educational environment for their child if he or she did not adapt well to the public school setting.
Tuesday the Senate Education Committee will hear three bills that would allow more students to be eligible for the program, which Edelblut told lawmakers would cost $30 million in each year of the biennium.
House Bill 367 would increase the income threshold for a child to be eligible for the program by about $9,000 for a family of four by increasing the cut from 300 percent of the federal poverty level to 350 percent.
House Bill 464 would allow children to automatically qualify if they are in foster care, military families, homeless, and transients. The cost of the change has not been determined although the bill passed the House.
And House Bill 446 would require the organization administering the program to inform parents they will lose their federal special education rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act if they participate in the program.
This is part of the voucher hoax. Children with special needs lose federal right to services if they switch to a voucher school, but most of these parents don’t know it.
The Senate Finance Committee will also have to decide if the House gave the University System of New Hampshire and the Community College System of New Hampshire, too much money, too little money or enough money.
The university system had hoped to finally return to the level of funding it had more than a decade ago, before the 2011-12 legislature cut it in half.
The House approved almost the $200 million the system received before the slashing, and added a little more so tuition could remain frozen and the Whittemore Center could be upgraded.
The community college system successfully fought off a plan by the governor to merge with the university system a biennium ago but continues to face the challenge of providing education in more technical fields while enrollment decreases particularly in the more traditional areas of instruction.
But the system has continued to freeze tuition like the university system in a state where the students have the highest college debt in the country.
New Hampshire’s education system is jumbled and in flux. One thing that could make things a little easier is additional money, but the only program with open-ended funding is the EFA and that could cost the state nearly $70 million a year if all the students in private and religious schools and homeschools decide to participate.
That is almost as much money a year the university system receives and more than the community college system receives.
Insensitivity and indifference to racism seem to be deeply embedded in the Republican Party. Especially, though not exclusively, in the South.
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey just forced Secretary of Early Childhood Education Barbara Cooper to resign over a book designed to train teachers to be aware of the different backgrounds and challenges of their students.
In a Friday afternoon news release, Gina Maiola, communications director for the governor’s office, said Ivey had accepted Cooper’s resignation after learning of a pre-K educator resource book that included “woke concepts.”
The book is the National Association for the Education of Young Children Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book, 4th Edition. It focuses on teaching children up to age of 8.
Cooper was unable to be reached Friday afternoon. The NAEYC said in a statement Friday evening that the program had been used for almost four decades and served as “the foundation for high-quality early childhood education across states and communities.”
“While not a curriculum, it is a responsive, educator-developed, educator-informed, and research-based resource that has been honed over multiple generations to support teachers in helping all children thrive and reach their full potential, ” the statement said. “Building on the good work that is happening in states and communities, NAEYC looks forward to continuing its partnership with families, educators, and policymakers to further our shared goals of offering joyful learning environments that see, support, and reflect all children and their families.”
In her email, Maiola said the governor’s office received a complaint about the book teaching white privilege, structural racism and messaging promoting “equality, dignity and worth” around LGBTQIA+ identities.
An Alabama Reflector review of the book, running over 800 pages in electronic form, found it focused on encouraging teachers to be aware of inequities, implicit bias and the diverse backgrounds of children in order to be better teachers and create welcoming environments for their students.
The book does not appear to tell teachers to discuss these issues with children directly.
“Teachers need to be particularly aware of providing supporting environments and responses to children who are members of marginalized groups and those who have been targets of bias and stereotyping,” one passage said.
Please open the link and read the rest of this shameful episode.
The New York Times reported that the College Board plans to revise its controversial AP African-American studies course. Last year, it was about to roll out a syllabus when a writer in The National Review said it was a radical Marxist course that would teach students to hate America. The state of Florida, under Governor DeSantis’ direction, negotiated with the College Board to remove topics and authors that it wanted removed. DeSantis announced that unless the course satisfied Florida, the state would ban it.
The College Board revised the course to satisfy Florida, and many schols of African-American studies objected.
The College Board said on Monday that it would revise its Advanced Placement African American studies course, less than three months after releasing it to a barrage of criticism from scholars, who accused the board of omitting key concepts and bending to political pressure from Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had said he would not approve the curriculum for use in Florida.
While written in couched terms, the College Board’s statement appeared to acknowledge that in its quest to offer the course to as many students as possible — including those in conservative states — it watered down key concepts.
“In embarking on this effort, access was our driving principle — both access to a discipline that has not been widely available to high school students, and access for as many of those students as possible,” the College Board wrote on it website. “Regrettably, along the way those dual access goals have come into conflict.”
The board, which did not respond immediately to an interview request, said on its website that a course development committee and experts within the Advanced Placement staff would determine the changes “over the next few months.”
The College Board, a billion-dollar nonprofit that administers the SAT and A.P. courses, ran headlong into a conflict between two sides unlikely to find any room for compromise. Black studies scholars believe that concepts the board de-emphasized — like reparations, Black Lives Matter and intersectionality — are foundational to the college-level discipline of African American studies. Conservatives — politicians, activists and some parents — believe the field is an example of liberal orthodoxy, and they are concerned that schools have focused too much on issues such as racism and systemic oppression.
Stay tuned. If DeSantis boycotts the course, other red states will follow. Will the College Board stick with the scholars or the market?
Politico reported that rightwing cultural warriors lost most school board elections, despite their big-money backers. Voters in Illinois and Wisconsin were not swayed by fear-mongering about critical race theory, LGBT issues, and other spurious claims of the extremists. These results should encourage the Democratic Party to challenge the attacks on public schools in the 2024 elections. An aggressive defense of public schools is good politics.
Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out.
Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms.
While there’s no official overall tally of school board results in states that held an array of elections on April 4, two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record. Liberals are now making the case that their winning bids for school board seats in Illinois and Wisconsin show they can beat back Republican attacks on divisive education issues.
The results could also serve as a renewed warning to Republican presidential hopefuls like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe.
“Where culture war issues were being waged by some school board candidates, those issues fell flat with voters,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association labor union. “The takeaway for us is that parents and community members and voters want candidates who are focused on strengthening our public schools, not abandoning them.”
The results from the Milwaukee and Chicago areas are hardly the last word on the matter. Thousands more local school elections are set for later this year in some two dozen states. They are often low turnout, low profile, and officially nonpartisan affairs, and conservatives say they are competing aggressively.
“We lost more than we won” earlier this month, said Ryan Girdusky, founder of the conservative 1776 Project political action committee, which has ties to GOP megadonor and billionaire Richard Uihlein and endorsed an array of school board candidates this spring and during the 2022 midterms.
“But we didn’t lose everything. We didn’t get obliterated,” Girdusky told POLITICO of his group’s performance. “We still pulled our weight through, and we just have to keep on pushing forward on this.”
Labor groups and Democratic operatives are nevertheless flexing over the defeat of candidates they opposed during races that took place near Chicago, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from state Democrats and the attention of Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, and in Wisconsin. Conservative board hopefuls also saw mixed results in Missouri and Oklahoma.
Democrats hope the spring school election season validates their playbook: Coordinate with local party officials, educator unions and allied community members to identify and support candidates who wield an affirming pro-public education message — and depict competitors as hard-right extremists.
Yet despite victories in one reliably blue state and one notorious battleground, liberals are still confronting Republican momentum this year that could resemble November’s stalemated midterm results for schools and keep the state of education divided along partisan lines.
Conservative states are already carrying out sharp restrictions on classroom lessons, LGBTQ students, and library books. And they are beginning to refine their message to appeal to moderates.
Trump, DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and other Republican presidential hopefuls are leaning on school-based wedge issues to court primary voters in a crowded White House campaign.
Open the link. The wedge issues are working against the Republicans. Most people know and like their tearchers and their public schools.
They are determined to divert more money and students away from public schools despite the compelling evidence that vouchers are harmful to students, most of whom will attend schools that are lower in quality than their public school.
Jan explains why public education is essential to our democracy, not as a consumer good, but as a civic responsibility:
If you are a supporter of public education, and in your state you face proposed legislation for school vouchers, you are unlikely to convince conservative Republicans to vote against vouchers.
The issue has become purely ideological—a matter of core belief. The late political theorist Benjamin Barber almost perfectly characterizes the divide between supporters of public institutions and the radical marketplace individualists:
“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck. Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)
Paul Bowers is an experienced journalist who writes a fascinating blog about South Carolina called “Brutal South.” In this post, he tells us who Nikki Haley, Republican Presidential candidate, is and whom she admires.
In his 2010 book of prophetic wisdom, Can America Survive? 10 Prophetic Signs That We Are the Terminal Generation, the Texas televangelist John Hagee recalls standing on a hill overlooking Megiddo in Israel, looking down into the valley, and envisioning a lake of blood 200 miles wide and as deep as a horse’s bridle.
In this and other bestselling books of prophecy, Pastor Hagee takes the book of Revelation literally and then prescribes a political program to bring about the end of human civilization as we know it. This is notable for a number of reasons, not least of which is that he has the ear of Republican presidential contender and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Like a lot of people, my ears perked up when Haley launched her campaign Feb. 15 in Charleston, South Carolina, and brought Pastor Hagee onstage to kick off the proceedings with a prayer. When Haley said, “To Pastor Hagee, I still say I want to be you when I grow up,” I nearly fell out of my chair. Like some kind of theological pervert, I went to the public library that week and borrowed every book by Hagee I could find.
I’ve been taking notes on these books and will probably write a more general synopsis at some point, but this week I want to linger on Can America Survive? It is an audacious book of geopolitical soothsaying, and it raises some questions that it would behoove political reporters to ask Haley on the campaign trail.
This book is, among other things, the most virulent Islamophobic text I have ever read. It repackages the “Eurabia” conspiracy theory for a U.S. audience, warning of an “Islamic population bomb” (p. 37) and favorably citing the British UKIP booster Melanie Phillips’ 2006 book Londonistan (p. 126). Hagee warns of secret Islamist sleeper cells throughout the heartland (p. 11) while advocating for spying on U.S. mosques and pre-emptive military strikes against Iran (p. 50). Hagee questions “radical Islam’s loyalty to America” after citing a random series of newspaper clippings about “honor killings” and claims, without evidence, that Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a No. 1 bestseller in unspecified Muslim countries (p. 26).
Please open the link and read on to understand Haley and other Christian nationalists.
Diane Ravitch's blog 