First, DeSantis retaliated by dissolving the Reedy Creek District, a special self-governing district controlled by Disney, which supplies all services to Disney’s theme park. DeSantis created a new board called the Central Florida Oversight District Board of Supervisors to oversee the district, packed with his cronies.
But before the legislation passed, Disney quietly held public meetings and granted its district decades of future control.
Outraged, DeSantis threatened to increase hotel taxes and put tolls on the roads to Disney. He also told the State Attorney General to investigate Disney. Not a nice way to treat the state’s biggest employer.
Now he is wreaking vengeance again:
The Disney versus DeSantis fight headed into round three on Monday as Florida’s governor announced that the Florida Legislature will revoke the last-minute development agreements that undercut the authority of the governor-controlled board and unleashed a litany of retributive efforts aimed at to the powerful corporation.
“We want to make sure that that Disney lives under the same laws as everybody else,’’ said Gov. Ron DeSantis at the headquarters of the Reedy Creek Improvement District near Orlando.
DeSantis said he has authorized state agencies to increase regulatory oversight over Disney operations, such as the monorail and amusement rides. He suggested the DeSantis-controlled oversight board could use undeveloped landnot owned by Disney for other purposes.
“Maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusement parks,’’ he said. “Someone even said like, maybe you need another state prison. Who knows? I mean, I just think that the possibilities are endless.”
The announcement comes two days before the newly-named Central Florida Tourism Oversight District’s Board of Supervisors is scheduled to review a new proposal to strengthen its authority over planning, zoning and land development regulations for the special taxing district that operates the 39-square-mile property on which Walt Disney World exists.
DeSantis must be terrifying every big corporation in the nation. This is a guy who puts his nose into corporate governance; he is also hostile to corporations that embrace equity, diversity and inclusion programs and environmental policies.
His desire to exercise political control over private corporations will not win new friends for him except his yahoo base.
The Tennessee legislature has passed a law controlling the freedom of teachers and college professors to discuss racism. Quite literally, teachers are required to deliver content without expressing a point of view, for instance, acknowledging that slavery was wrong. The author of the bill says he is promoting freedom of expression by restricting freedom of expression.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—
“Divisive concept” rules are a set of laws passed last year that include many concepts usually taught in courses like sociology, psychology and political sciences.
The bill passed the House of Representatives on April 13, after passing Senate on April 5.
In 2022, lawmakers passed rules that allow state leaders to withhold funding for schools that teach about social, cultural and legal issues related to race and racism. Most of those concepts focus on how the impact of racism affects people today.
The law also specified that schools can teach about ethnic groups’ histories as described in textbooks and instructional materials. Educators can also only teach about controversial aspects of history, such as racial oppression or slavery, as long those discussions are impartial.
The bill, HB 1376, was introduced by Representative John Ragan (R – Oak Ridge). He previously said that the new bill was meant to strengthen the law passed in 2022 by “promoting freedom of expression,” and keep “colleges about advancing knowledge, not about advancing political or social agendas.”
Originally, the bill required institutions to publish a syllabus for each course offered in the semester on its website, meant to assess whether a “divisive concept” may be included in the curriculum. That requirement was removed in an amendment to the bill.
The bill restricts universities from using state funds for meetings or activities of an organization that “endorses or promotes a divisive concept.” It also requires employees who support diversity initiatives to “increase intellectual diversity” and support students through mentoring, career readiness and workforce development initiatives.
Employees would be exempt from the requirement if the new duties conflict with other laws, such as Title IX officers.
It also allows students and employees who believe that the school violated last year’s law a chance to file a report with the school. The school would then need to annually report violations to the comptroller of the treasury, redacting them as needed to stay in compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
The bill would also specifically require universities to allow any guest speaker on campus regardless of “non-violent political ideology” or “non-violent political party affiliation.”
The concepts that were banned from lessons in 2022’s law are listed below.
That one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex
That a person, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist or oppressive — whether consciously or subconsciously
That a person should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of their race or sex
That a person’s moral character is determined by their race or sex
That a person, by virtue of their race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex
That a person should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress because of their race or sex
That a meritocracy is inherently racist, sexist or designed by a particular race or sex to oppress members of another race or sex
That Tennessee or the U.S. is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist
Promoting or advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government
Promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people
Ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges or beliefs to a race or sex, or to a person because of their race or sex
That the rule of law does not exist but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups
That “all Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
That governments should deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the law
It also bans lessons that include “race or sex scapegoating” or “race or sex stereotyping,” as those terms are defined in law. In October 2022, a group of UT faculty called the law “chilling,” and questioned the law’s intent.
Rep. Justin Jones (D – Nashville) spoke about the bill when he returned to the House of Representatives after he was expelled and reinstated. He asked a series of questions, such as whether “college students are mature enough to talk about race and systemic racism, some of the concepts you want to prohibit being discussed at the college level?”
“I believe in God. All else is settled by facts and data,” Ragan said.
Jones again asked him to answer the question, but Ragan said he responded to the question.
“So, we’re playing ‘not-answer.’ Okay,” Jones said.
He also asked why the bill was introduced and said it seemed based on “white fragility and fears of the truth of history.”
“This bill was brought to me by a dean of college education, in addition to another university contributed to this bill. That was my motivation, too,” Ragan said.
He also said he did not want to name the person who brought the bill to him.
“How will we be honest about our history if you’re prohibiting any concepts about America’s racist history?” Jones said. “This sounds like fascism. This sounds like authoritarianism. This does not sound like democracy or freedom … This member has consistently invoked God to justify this unjust, immoral and extreme, racist law.”
Speaker Cameron Sexton (R – Crossville) stopped Jones from speaking. Rep. Justin Pearson (D – Memphis) also spoke after being reinstated to the House.
“This is a deeply concerning bill because it is continuing a pattern of practice that is harmful to all people,” he said. “When you try to control what a person thinks, then you are assuming the role of God rather than allowing freedom of thought.”
He said that the list of “divisive concepts” bars discussions on biases, white privilege and racism’s role in slavery.
The bill passed by a vote of 68-26 in the House.
During a meeting on March 13, Ragan said he received complaints from universities in the state about an “overemphasis” of the original law at the expense of “intellectual diversity,” which led to him proposing the new bill.
Representative Harold Love, Jr. (D – Nashville) previously asked if a conference focusing on Black history could still be held and promoted by a university should the bill pass. Ragan said it would be allowed as long as they “are not required to promote or endorse.”
Paul Waldman of the Washington Post shows how the FOX “personalities” lied to their audience because they were afraid the audience would go to other sites that fed the audience’s hunger for conspiracy theories. The FOX talking heads created the monster, and now they are owned by the monster. All of this is especially interesting because Dominion Voting Systems is suing FOX and others for libel, and the FOX statements show that they knew their on-air statements were lies.
On screen, Fox News personalities paint a world of clear heroes and villains, where conservatives are always strong and right and liberals are weak and wrong. But the extraordinary private communications revealed in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox show who they really are. Panicked over Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, those same hosts, and the executives who run the network, cowered in abject terror.
They feared the same monster that keeps House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) up at night, the monster that conservative media and Republican politicians created: base voters who are deluded, angry and vengeful.
McCarthy has sought to appease the beast by granting exclusive access to 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But with each capitulation, McCarthy and Fox News only make the monster stronger.
To see how, begin with the Dominion lawsuit. The company, which makes election software and voting machines, alleges that Fox defamed its business by repeatedly claiming that its systems were used to steal the 2020 presidential election. To win this kind of case against a news organization, a plaintiff must show that the organization acted with “actual malice” — that it said things it knew were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Mistakes alone are not enough.
Emails and texts sent in the days after the election appear to show exactly that. On air, Fox was spreading lies about supposed election fraud and bringing on guests without concern for their credibility, including Rudy Giuliani and GOP lawyer Sidney Powell. Meanwhile, Fox’s stars and executives privately belittled those same people and the claims they were making.
“Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in one email. Giuliani was “acting like an insane person,” host Sean Hannity declared.
At the same time, Fox News tried to suppress the truth. Reporters for the organization who corrected false claims were reprimanded and threatened. One reporter who fact-checked Powell and Giuliani was told by her boss that executives were not happy about it and that she should do a better job of “respecting our audience.” When Fox truthfully reported Joe Biden’s victory, Carlson texted his producer: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real.” When another reporter fact-checked a Trump tweet spreading lies about stolen votes, Carlson demanded that the reporter be fired.
These documents make clear not only that Fox News stars and executives think their audience is a bunch of half-wits but also that they live in fear that the audience will turn on them unless they tell viewers exactly what they want to hear regardless of the facts.
Who taught that audience to believe conspiracy theories and to assume that any unwelcome information must be a sinister lie? Fox News, of course.
Now consider Jan. 6. McCarthy knows the facts. The Capitol insurrection wasn’t a false-flag operation by antifa or the FBI. Indeed, McCarthy initially blasted Trump for his role in stirring the rioters and dismissed conspiracy theories. So why has he given exclusive access to surveillance footage to Carlson, the constant purveyor of conspiracy theories?
There’s no mystery. Carlson’s producers will comb through endless pixels to find images with which to mislead viewers: to convince them that the riot wasn’t so bad or that Trump’s supporters weren’t to blame or that the whole thing was a setup.
That will only further convince Carlson’s audience to deny the truth about Jan. 6, and punish any Republican officeholder who disagrees. As for McCarthy, will this exercise help him by making it more likely that Republicans will reinforce his thin House majority in the next election — or take the Senate or the White House? Quite the opposite. It only makes it more likely that voters will view his party as extremists and loons who are far more interested in the obsessions of a spectacularly unpopular ex-president than in the genuine problems the country faces.
Like the trembling dissemblers of Fox News, McCarthy must feel that he has no choice: Feed the beast or be eaten by it. Winning the future is an idea they cannot latch on to because they are so frantic to survive one more day.
Republican elites are not powerless. They helped make this mess and could nudge their base back toward reality if they chose. But they’re too afraid to try.
Nancy Bailey is a retired teacher with long experience in the classroom. She has a talent for picking out charlatans from the pundits who make a living telling teachers what to do, despite their lack of experience. She gets irritated by purveyors of doom and gloom, especially when it is not warranted. Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings inflicted irreparable harm on America’s public schools by their imposition of the failed No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top programs; these federal mandates continue to erode what’s left of the joy of learning by their emphasis on standardized testing and pressure to close public schools and open privatized charter schools.
Nancy and I collaborated on a book published by Teachers College Press called Edspeak and Doublespeak: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. It names names and calls out the privatizers who call themselves “reformers.”
A survey conducted in March of 2023 for the group Learning Heroes found 90 percent of parents think their kids are doing fine, but standardized test scores show otherwise. Among eighth graders, for example, just 29 percent were proficient in reading either at or above their grade level. In math, just 26 percent were considered proficient. This sheds light on what’s being called the parent perception gap.
Learning Heroes? They’re a group called a campaign, seemingly to create divisiveness, sowing distrust in teachers and public schools, to tell parents about so-called gaps in student learning. They call parents learning heroes. They appear to be critical of grades and a teacher’s evaluation of the student, and they focus on standardized test scores.
Gaps have been the focus for 22 years since No Child Left Behind, and Duncan and Spellings had their chance to reduce the learning and opportunity gaps they speak about. They never discuss or seem to reflect on their accountability for public school problems, especially their emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing.
Learning gaps are the difference or disparities between what students learn and grade-level expectations. Adults create expectations with standardized tests. Few raise questions about whether such expectations could be developmentally inappropriate, and even when they do, they’re ignored.
Opportunity gaps are life factors children struggle with surrounding ethnicity, race, gender, disability, and income. Many children facing opportunity gaps attend poor schools without resources or quality curricula.
Learning Heroes receives support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Charles and Lynn Shusterman Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Looking closer at the learning heroes team, many come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The PBS report also references Go Beyond the Grades, connected to the Chamber of Commerce, which has never been optimistic about public education either. Remember their state-by-state report called Leaders and Laggards?
What’s ironic is that these same individuals helped put high-stakes standardized testing and Common Core State Standards in place years ago, along with other bad reforms, and they still complain that public schools are failing. They’re criticizing their own failed ideology in the name of school privatization!
This is a wonderful post. Please open the link and read it all!
Inspired by Nancy’s post, I wrote a letter to PBS Newshour. I hope you will too. Write to: viewermail@newshour.org
Dear Newshour Staff,
I was disappointed to see that you invited the overseers of the past two decades to discuss the situation of American education.
No Child Left Behind (Spellings) and Race to the Top (Duncan) were both disasters. Both inflicted and intensified the overuse and abuse of standardized testing in America’s public schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools were closed based on these invalid and unreliable measures.
Spellings and Duncan spent years promoting failed policies and are now called upon by PBS to comment on the outcomes of their punitive and ineffective ideas. They are in no position to say where we went wrong, because they were the architects of the disaster.
You really should invite dispassionate experts to review their record, rather than invite those who imposed bad ideas.
Can anyone honestly say that “no child was left behind” after more than a dozen years of NCLB? Can anyone say that the $500 billion spent on Race to the Top was successful in any respect? The answer to both questions is no.
NCLB and RTTT have demoralized a generation of teachers; destroyed the joy of learning; and produced no improvement. Worse, they created a canard about “failing schools” that completely ignores the root causes of poor student performance.
What if those billions had been spent on reducing class sizes; raising teachers’ salaries; upgrading obsolete facilities; ensuring that every child had access to nutrition and medical check-ups?
It boggles my mind that the Newshour would buy into the myths of the past 20 years instead of digging deeper to understand the underlying issues.
The Idaho legislature turned down a voucher expansion that would have subsidized the tuition of rich kids. Behind the voucher defeat was a passionate network of parents determined to keep public dollars in public schools.
Last year, Idaho’s legislature passed a limited school voucher bill; this year school voucher supporters raised a more expansive proposal that was just defeated by Republicans.
Last year’s Empowering Parents Grant Program used $50 million of American Rescue Plan recovery money to give education vouchers to families. It limited the education savings account (ESA) vouchers to students who were already enrolled in public schools and whose families had an income equal to or less than 250% of the free or reduced lunch cut-off.
That program was established on a modest scale. This year voucher supporters proposed a larger, more universal form.
Senate Bill 1038 included no income limits and no requirements for previously attending public school. In other words, a wealthy family who had always enrolled their children in private school or home school would get $6,000 of taxpayer money, and that money would be pulled from the funding for schools that the students had never attended in the first place; the school’s funding would be reduced, but their operating costs would not.
As Senator C, Scott Grow (R-Eagle) put it, “I have absolutely no clue what the dollar amount on this is.”
It’s a huge amount of taxpayer money to be taken out of the public school system and distributed without oversight or accountability, and while conservative lawmakers in some states have not balked at that issue, some Idaho GOP members were not having it. Reported the Idaho Statesman:
“It’s actually against my conservative, Republican perspective to hand this money out with no accountability that these precious tax dollars are being used wisely,” said Sen. Dave Lent, R-Idaho Falls…
McCann and Lanting both said for every email supporting ESA legislation, they receive five opposing it. Lanting represents the same district as Clow.Rep. Mark Sauter, R-Sandpoint, said voting for the legislation would be equivalent to voting against his constituency.
FOX “news” is battling a $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, which claims it suffered damage to its reputation and to the lives and safety of its employees because FOX repeatedly aired conspiracy theories about the election. These theories, repeated numerous times on FOX, asserted that the Dominion Voting machines were programmed to flip votes from Trump to Biden. Some who were interviewed numerous times on air by leading talk-show hosts claimed that Dominion machines originated in Venezuela, when left-wing tyrant Hugo Chavez was president.
Depositions of the talk-show hosts and of Rupert Murdoch showed that none of them believed that Trump won the election, yet they continued to feature election deniers. The talk-show hosts laughed at the claims of the election deniers, yet interviewed them repeatedly.
FOX’s defense is that it was reporting the news. Any judgment against FOX, its lawyers say, would restrict freedom of the press. Read the debate here on NPR.
FOX’s lawyers rely on a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1964, New York Times v. Sullivan. The Times won the case, and the high court made it very difficult to sue a media outlet for defamation or libel.
As a result of that decision, the media and individuals can ridicule public officials without fear of being sued for libel or defamation.
Now, here is the irony: Conservatives don’t like the Sullivan decision. Trump railed against it. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch think it should be “reviewed,” presumably the way they reviewed Roe v. Wade.
Ron DeSantis has initiated legislation that would lower the bar for libel suits against public officials. He wants to be able to sue reporters and newspapers that criticize him.
If DeSantis had his way, FOX would undoubtedly lose its case. FOX now defends its lies by appealing to Sullivan. If DeSantis had his way, Dominion would win, and FOX would lose.
Okay–where do you think this next excerpt came from?
Our public schools are one of the few unifying institutions that we have left. If we allow [something] to continue to individualize and atomize the classroom, we shouldn’t be surprised if our culture and political climate follow suit. In a traditional classroom with central texts, common knowledge, and routinized behavioral norms, our children learn to let another finish speaking before interrupting, no matter how much they might disagree. How many complete strangers could spark up a conversation over their shared love—or perhaps disdain—for the Great Gatsby because so many of us have read it in high school?
Traditional literature classrooms in particular seem all the more important as technology advances. When children spend ever more timeisolated in their rooms, endlessly scrolling on their phone, depressed and anxious, the act of putting a phone away, reading together, and then making eye contact to discuss the text could be the very “social and emotional” support that they need. When artificial technology can accomplish evermore tasks, enjoying a book with friends is one of the few remaining, distinctly human pleasures.
Is this me, arguing against current versions of school choice, particularly tech-based versions like micro-schools?
Nope. This is Daniel Buck, rising star conservative education writer on the AEI/Fordham circuit. I’ve written about him before, and you can check that out if you want more of his story or the story of his website, but for right now, mostly what you need to know is that Buck’s specialty is arguing against straw versions of progressive education stuff, which is what he says he’s railing at. My impression is that Buck means well, but doesn’t spend near enough time reading actual non-conservatives about education.
Here he’s railing against progressives who, in his telling, are out there letting students in classes pick all sort of different texts and do different things and follow different muses and while I have no doubt such teachers exist (in a pool of 4 million, you can find examples of anything), I’ll bet that most teachers, conservative or not, find the idea of overseeing 130 different individual reading units the stuff of nightmares.
No, the place you’re much more likely to find an array of students following an atomized assortment of varied educational paths would be a city that offers dozens of school choices, from “classical” whiteness to computer-driven whatever to contemporary diverse authors to neo-Nazi home schooling.
The argument he makes in this latest piece–that the nation benefits from having students share core experiences together while learning some of the same material even as they learn how to function in a mini-community of different people from different backgrounds–that’s an argument familiar to advocates of public education. The “agonizing individualism” and personalized selfishness that he argues against are, for many people, features of modern school choice–not public schools.
Steve Hinnefeld writes about a threat in Indiana to ban books and to criminalize librarians who allow anyone to check out a banned book.
Hat’s off to Indiana’s librarians. They turned out in force last week when legislators considered making it easier to ban books and prosecute people who provide material that’s “harmful to minors.” And they pushed back when lawmakers suggested they didn’t know what they were saying.
The legislation was written and ready to roll. For now, though, it’s off the table. Steve warns that it could be attached to another bill. Hoosier librarians are watching.
The following was posted by Anand Giridhadaras on his blog The Ink. He is the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
In 2017, a political eternity ago, I gave a talk at the Obama Summit in Chicago. One section of it dealt with the question of so-called wokeness, which has in the years since between a national tinderbox, with more heat than light. I wanted to share that part of the speech today. The bottom line: Wokeness is good, actually. But we need a plan for the still-waking……
As our society fractures, some change-makers are drawn to visions of progress that don’t bother with suasion. I’m thinking especially of those of us who live in what we regard as the America of the future and who think of ourselves as “woke” — aware of injustice, committed to pluralism, willing to fight for it.
As wokeness has percolated from Black resistance into the cultural mainstream, it seems at times to have become a test you must pass to engage with the enlightened, not a gospel the enlightened aspire to spread. Either you buy our whole program, use all the right terms, and expertly check your privilege, or you’re irredeemable.
Is there space among the woke for the still-waking?
Today, there are millions who are ambivalent between the politics of inclusion and the politics of exclusion — not quite woke, not quite hateful.
Men unprepared by their upbringing to know their place in an equal world. White people unready for a new day in which Americanness no longer means whiteness. People anxious about change’s pace, about the death of certainties.
The woke have a choice about how to deal with the ambivalent. Do you focus on building a fortress to protect yourselves from them? Or a road to help them cross the mountain?
A common answer to this question is that the people angry at losing status don’t deserve any help. They’ve been helped.
I understand this response. It is hardly the fault of the rest of us that those wielding unearned privilege bristle at surrendering it. But it is our problem. The burden of citizenship is committing to your fellow citizens and accepting that what is not your fault may be your problem. And that, amid great change, it is in all of our interest to help people see who they will be on the other side of the mountaintop.
When we accept these duties, we may begin to notice the ways in which our very different pains rhyme. The African-American retiree in Brooklyn who fears gentrification is whitening her borough beyond recognition probably votes differently from the white foreman in Arizona who fears immigration is browning his state. Yet their worries echo.
When we learn to detect such resonances, we gain the understanding of other people that is required to win them over, and not simply to resist them.
It isn’t enough to be right about the world you want to live in. You gotta sell it, even to those you fear.
I find this rhetoric very appealing. Of course, we should try to persuade those who don’t agree with us, as they try to persuade us we are wrong.
But I think the appeal to reason is doomed. It would be like trying to persuade a devout follower of Trump that he is a con man. I have tried but never succeeded, just as they have tried to persuade me that Biden is demented, with no success.
The leaders of the anti-WOKE frenzy, like DeSantis and Rufo, are riding this crusade for power and money. They are not open to suasion.
Their followers tend not to be able to define what WOKE is. They just know they are against it. They assume that WOKE means grievance politics, and they want nothing to do with it.
I’ll see if Anand has some useful ideas about how to remove the stigma that rightwing rabble rousers have attached to the word WOKE. I certainly see nothing attractive in their antonyms: “I’m sleeping.” “I’m not awake.” “I have no interest in making the world a better place.” “I don’t care about social justice.” Who would espouse such views?
The blog called “Misinformation Kills” usually focuses on COVID Lies and misinformation and their perpetrators. In this post, however, Dr. Alison Neitzel takes a different perspective on the money men who are undermining our democracy by capturing the courts.
It involves not only Harlan Crowe, the very generous benefactor of Justice Clarence Thomas, but Charles Koch and the mysterious Council on National Policy, where rightwing zealots meet and greet and plan their strategy.
Leonard Leo, the Catholic and deeply conservative leader of the Federalist society, planned the successful conquest of the U.S. Supreme Court. Donald Trump was his useful idiot.
Koch is all in for deregulation. But not when women’s reproductive rights are at issue.
Will Justice Thomas be held accountable for his unethical behavior? His benefactors will protect him. His dear personal friendship with Mr. Crowe began after Justice Thomas joined the Supreme Court. What a coincidence!
